Business Process Reengineering
Business Process Reengineering
Business Process Reengineering
environment. The entire technological, human, and organizational dimensions may be changed in BPR. Information Technology plays a major role in Business Process Reengineering as it provides office automation, it allows the business to be conducted in different locations, provides flexibility in manufacturing, permits quicker delivery to customers and supports rapid and paperless transactions. In general it allows an efficient and effective change in the manner in which work is performed. What is the Business Process Re-engineering The globalization of the economy and the liberalization of the trade markets have formulated new conditions in the market place which are characterized by instability and intensive competition in the business environment. Competition is continuously increasing with respect to price, quality and selection, service and promptness of delivery. Removal of barriers, international cooperation, technological innovations cause competition to intensify. All these changes impose the need for organizational transformation, where the entire processes, organization climate and organization structure are changed. Hammer and Champy provide the following definitions: Reengineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed. Process is a structured, measured set of activities designed to produce a specified output for a particular customer or market. It implies a strong emphasis on how work is done within an organization. "(Davenport 1993). Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) is basically rethinking and radically redesigning an organization's existing resources. BPR, however, is more than just business improvising; it is an approach for redesigning the way work is done to better support the organization's mission and reduce costs. Reengineering starts with a high-level assessment of the organization's mission, strategic goals, and customer needs. Basic questions are asked, such as "Does our mission need to be redefined? Are our strategic goals aligned with our mission? Who are our customers?" An organization may find that it is operating on questionable assumptions, particularly in terms of the wants and needs of its customers. Only after the organization rethinks what it should be doing, does it go on to decide how best to do it. Within the framework of this basic assessment of mission and goals, re-engineering focuses on the organization's business processesthe steps and procedures that govern how resources are used to create products and services that meet the needs of particular customers or markets. As a structured ordering of work steps across time and place, a business process can be decomposed into specific activities, measured, modeled, and improved. It can also be completely redesigned or eliminated altogether. Re-engineering identifies, analyzes, and re-designs an organization's core business processes with the aim of achieving dramatic improvements in critical performance measures, such as cost, quality, service, and speed.
Re-engineering recognizes that an organization's business processes are usually fragmented into subprocesses and tasks that are carried out by several specialized functional areas within the organization. Often, no one is responsible for the overall performance of the entire process. Reengineering maintains that optimizing the performance of subprocesses can result in some benefits, but cannot yield dramatic improvements if the process itself is fundamentally inefficient and outmoded. For that reason, re-engineering focuses on re-designing the process as a whole in order to achieve the greatest possible benefits to the organization and their customers. This drive for realizing dramatic improvements by fundamentally re-thinking how the organization's work should be done distinguishes re-engineering from process improvement efforts that focus on functional or incremental improvement II. Process Business Process Reengineering is a dramatic change initiative that contains five major steps. Managers should: Refocus company values on customer needs; Redesign core processes, often using information technology to enable improvements; Reorganize a business into cross-functional teams with end-to-end responsibility for a process; Rethink basic organizational and people issues; Improve business processes across the organization.