Cs507 Business Process Reengineering

Assignment Topic: The topic of the assignment is Business Process Reengineering. Objective: This assignment has been designed so that students study different processes to explore the ideas of BPR. Assignment:

Q: - Why and how BPR is using by organizations and identify problems that effect reengineering success? Ans:Business process Reengineering: Business process reengineering (BPR) is a management approach aiming at improvements by means of elevating efficiency and effectiveness of the processes that exist within and across organizations. The key to BPR is for organizations to look at their business processes from a "clean slate" perspective and determine how they can best construct these processes to improve how they conduct business. Business process reengineering is also known as BPR, Business Process Redesign, Business Transformation, or Business Process Change Management. 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. The focus of this technique or method is to smooth the procedures & approaches undertaken by various departments of an organization to achieve their respective objectives. The term rethinking refers to the idea of firstly studying & then analyzing all or any of the processes to any extent depending on the need & objective of change. The objectives to be achieved according to this definition are to qualitatively enhance the efficiency & quality of delivery & production of goods & services, to achieve qualitative improvement in the handling of production, procedural & customer related matters. The concept of BPR can be understood in the following manner. “The analysis & design of workflow & processes within & between organizations.”

It extends the concept of BPR by studying the links of various procedures used by & between organizations. A number of processes undertaken within the organization may have links with external organizations either as input or output. For example, raw material purchases from suppliers are an integral part of planning, production & sales. Hence making the supplier more efficient to deliver on time becomes critical, industrial customers placing regular huge volume orders in accordance with their own plans. You as the supplier need this information to input into your own planning. One of the main goals of introducing BPR in organization is to provide a competitive edge to the business & that can only be achieved by providing a better product in a timely fashion to the customers in accordance with their needs. While use of BPR helps an organization in gaining competitive advantage in the use of processes, effectiveness & efficiency should be also kept in mind.

Major steps in BPR: Senior managers may begin the task of process alignment by a series of BPR steps. These steps develop a self-reinforcing cycle of commitment, communication & culture change. The steps may include gaining commitment to change through the formulation of the top team, developing a shared vision & mission of the business & of what change is required, defining the measureable objectives, which must be agreed by the team, as being the quantifiable indicators of success in terms of the mission, identify the CSFs based on the mission of the organization. Following steps should be followed to implement BPR. 1. Break down the CSFs into the key or critical business processes & gain process ownership. 2. Break down the critical processes into sub processes, activities & tasks & form the teams around these. 3. Redesign, monitor & adjust the process alignment in response to difficulties in the change process.

Problems that effect BPR: The most frequent and harsh 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 "When I wrote about "business process redesign" in 1990, I explicitly said that using it for cost reduction alone was not a sensible goal. And consultants Michael Hammer and James Champy, the two names most closely associated with reengineering, have insisted all along that layoffs shouldn't be the point. But the fact is, once out of the bottle, the reengineering genie quickly turned ugly." Michael Hammer similarly admitted that "I wasn't smart enough about that. I was reflecting my engineering background and was insufficient appreciative of the human dimension. I've learned that's critical." Other criticism brought forward against the BPR concept include, 1. Lack of management support for the initiative and thus poor acceptance in the

organization. 2. Exaggerated expectations regarding the potential benefits from a BPR initiative and

consequently failure to achieve the expected results. 3. Underestimation of the resistance to change within the organization. 4. Implementation of generic so-called best-practice processes that do not fit specific

company needs. 5. Over trust in technology solutions. 6. Performing BPR as a one-off project with limited strategy alignment and long-term

perspective. 7. Poor project management.