According to wikipedia, 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.
BPR if implemented properly can give huge returns to organization. One of the success story that I have encountered while researching BPR is the success of General Motors Corporation (GM) regarding their use of BPR. Their reengineering process involved replacing their existing systems like desktop systems, network operating systems and application development tools into a more manageable number of vendors and technology platforms. It’s interesting on how these changes saved GM a lot of money on hardware cost, licensing fees, and support cost.
Not every company needs to reinvent itself. There is a saying “do not fix things that is not broken”. But now a day, for a company to stay competitive and profitable they have to change their existing system to a better one. Analysing the existing system before undergoing a BPR project is vital. A company must analyse if the existing system can co-exist with new system during transition and retirement of the old system. Furthermore, assessing if the existing software can be reused and review existing programs if it can be refined. Keeping these perspectives in mind will help the success of implementing BPR.
I would say that back in the 1990’s BPR was widely accepted by organizations because of the constant change in technology and changing ways of doing business. Large corporations have accepted the method in way to reduce their overall operations cost and increase their overall profits. A major improvement in their business process leads to a workforce reductions. They focus mainly on technology and not on their most valuable asset - people. This leads to a low morale in their employees, which in turn leads to a low productivity.
BPR is not widely used anymore. The recently accepted concept now a day is Business Process Management (BPM). It has gained major attention in many organizations and it is considered as a successor to BPR.
Websites visited:
http://search.bnet.com/search/Business+Process+and+Business+process+reengineering
http://www.bpmroi.techweb.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_reengineering#Successes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_reengineering
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A good introduction. A good use of “Clean slate”, its gives a good idea of what BPR is referring to. GM was a good example. It gave a good understanding of BPR, and that it includes everything from changing software to network systems. BPR can be a good way to re-invent your business and to make it profitable. The key factor is that BPR should be used properly from the beginning.
You made it clear that every company has to constantly change in order to stay on top of the competition. Still, BPR is not for every company and not every company needs it to make their business profitable. Analyzing the current system is vital before using BPR. It is necessary to know whether the current system can co-exist with the new system.
I agree with you on company’s most important asset – employees. Most companies when faced with the challenge of reducing cost automatically think that they have to reduce the workforce. Management forgets one simple thing that in most cases, it’s the same employees that made the company a success. Therefore these employees are the asset and by removing this asset is one major mistake. This is one of the biggest reasons why BPR fail. You also mentioned Business Process Management. I used to think that it is the same thing but now I know that BPM is the successor to BPR.
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