Katana VentraIP

Business process re-engineering

Business process re-engineering (BPR) is a business management strategy originally pioneered in the early 1990s, focusing on the analysis and design of workflows and business processes within an organization. BPR aims to help organizations fundamentally rethink how they do their work in order to improve customer service, cut operational costs, and become world-class competitors.[1]

BPR seeks to help companies radically restructure their organizations by focusing on the ground-up design of their business processes. According to early BPR proponent Thomas H. Davenport (1990), a business process is a set of logically related tasks performed to achieve a defined business outcome. Re-engineering emphasized a holistic focus on business objectives and how processes related to them, encouraging full-scale recreation of processes, rather than iterative optimization of sub-processes.[1] BPR is influenced by technological innovations as industry players replace old methods of business operations with cost-saving innovative technologies such as automation that can radically transform business operations.[2]


Business process re-engineering is also known as business process redesign, business transformation, or business process change management.

"... the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve ... improvements in critical contemporary modern measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and speed."

[8]

"encompasses the envisioning of new work strategies, the actual process design activity, and the implementation of the change in all its complex technological, human, and organizational dimensions."

[9]

competency of the members of the team, their motivation,

[26]

their credibility within the organization and their creativity,

[27]

team empowerment, training of members in process mapping and brainstorming techniques,

[28]

effective team leadership,

[29]

proper organization of the team,

[30]

complementary skills among team members, adequate size, interchangeable accountability, clarity of work approach, and

specificity of goals.

[31]

Reengineering assumes that the factor that limits an organization's performance is the ineffectiveness of its processes (which may or may not be true) and offers no means of validating that assumption.

Reengineering assumes the need to start the process of performance improvement with a "clean slate," i.e. totally disregard the .

status quo

According to (and his Theory of Constraints) reengineering does not provide an effective way to focus improvement efforts on the organization's constraint.

Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Many companies used reengineering as a pretext to downsizing, though this was not the intent of reengineering's proponents; consequently, reengineering earned a reputation for being synonymous with downsizing and layoffs.[44][45]


In many circumstances, reengineering has not always lived up to its expectations. Some prominent reasons include:


Others have claimed that reengineering was a recycled buzzword for commonly-held ideas. Abrahamson (1996) argued that fashionable management terms tend to follow a lifecycle, which for Reengineering peaked between 1993 and 1996 (Ponzi and Koenig 2002). They argue that Reengineering was in fact nothing new (as e.g. when Henry Ford implemented the assembly line in 1908, he was in fact reengineering, radically changing the way of thinking in an organization).


The most frequent critique against BPR concerns the strict focus on efficiency and technology and the disregard of people in the organization that is subjected to a reengineering initiative. Very often, the label BPR was used for major workforce reductions. Thomas Davenport, an early BPR proponent, stated that:


Hammer similarly admitted that:

Business process management

(BPMN)

Business Process Modeling Notation

Kaizen

Learning agenda

Abrahamson, E. (1996). Management fashion, , 21, 254–285.

Academy of Management Review

Champy, J. (1995). Reengineering Management, , New York.

Harper Business Books

Davenport, Thomas & Short, J. (1990), "The New Industrial Engineering: Information Technology and Business Process Redesign", in: , Summer 1990, pp 11–27

Sloan Management Review

Davenport, Thomas (1993), Process Innovation: Reengineering work through information technology, Harvard Business School Press, Boston

Davenport, Thomas (1995), , Fast Company, November 1995.

Reengineering – The Fad That Forgot People

Drucker, Peter (1972), "Work and Tools", in: W. Kranzberg and W.H. Davenport (eds), Technology and Culture, New York

Dubois, H. F. W. (2002). "Harmonization of the European vaccination policy and the role TQM and reengineering could play", Quality Management in Health Care, 10(2): pp. 47–57.

"PDF"

(1995), Windows on the workplace, Cornerstone

Greenbaum, Joan

Guha, S.; & Teng, T.C., Business Process Reengineering: Building a Comprehensive Methodology, Information Systems Management, Summer 1993

Kettinger, W.J.

(1990). "Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate", Harvard Business Review, July/August, pp. 104–112.

Hammer, M.

Hammer, M. and : (1993) Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, Harper Business Books, New York, 1993. ISBN 0-06-662112-7.

Champy, J. A.

Hammer, M. and Stanton, S. (1995). "The Reengineering Revolution", Harper Collins, London, 1995.

Hansen, Gregory (1993) "Automating Business Process Reengineering", .

Prentice Hall

Hussein, Bassam (2008), PRISM: Process Re-engineering Integrated Spiral Model, [1]

VDM Verlag

Industry Week (1994), "De-engineering the corporation", Industry Week article, 4/18/94

Johansson, Henry J. et al. (1993), Business Process Reengineering: BreakPoint Strategies for Market Dominance, John Wiley & Sons

Leavitt, H.J. (1965), "Applied Organizational Change in Industry: Structural, Technological and Humanistic Approaches", in: James March (ed.), Handbook of Organizations, Rand McNally, Chicago

Loyd, Tom (1994), "Giants with Feet of Clay", Financial Times, 5 Dec 1994, p 8

Malhotra, Yogesh (1998), "", IEEE Engineering Management Review, vol. 26, no. 3, Fall 1998.

Business Process Redesign: An Overview

Ponzi, L.; Koenig, M. (2002). . Information Research. 8 (1).

"Knowledge management: another management fad?"

"Reengineering Reviewed", (1994). , 2 July 1994, pp 66.

The Economist

Roberts, Lon (1994), Process Reengineering: The Key To Achieving Breakthrough Success, Quality Press, Milwaukee.

Rummler, Geary A. and Brache, Alan P. Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space in the Organization Chart,  0-7879-0090-7.

ISBN

Taylor (1911), Frederick, , Harper & Row, New York]

The principles of scientific management

(1969), Organizations in Action, MacGraw-Hill, New York

Thompson, James D.

White, JB (1996), Wall Street Journal. New York, N.Y.: 26 Nov 1996. pg. A.1

IEEE Engineering Management Review

Business Process Redesign: An Overview

BPR : Decision engineering in a strained industrial and business environment