he analysis and design of workflows and processes within an organization.

A business process is a set of

logically related tasks performed to achieve a defined business outcome. Re-engineering is the basis for
many recent developments in management. The cross-functional team, for example, has become popular
because of the desire to re-engineer separate functional tasks into complete cross-functional processes.
[citation needed]
 Also, many recent management information systems developments aim to integrate a wide
number of business functions. Enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, knowledge
management systems, groupware and collaborative systems, Human Resource Management
Systems and customer relationship management.

Business Process Reengineering is also known as Business Process Redesign, Business

Transformation, or Business Process Change Management.

Contents
 [hide]

1 Overview

2 History

o 2.1 Development after 1995

3 Business process reengineering

topics

o 3.1 Definition

o 3.2 The role of information

technology

o 3.3 Research &

Methodology

4 Critique

5 See also

6 References

7 Further reading

8 External links

[edit]Overview

Business process reengineering (BPR) began as a private sector technique to

help organizations fundamentally rethink how they do their work in order to dramatically improve customer
service, cutoperational costs, and become world-class competitors. A key stimulus for reengineering has
been the continuing development and deployment of sophisticated information systems and networks.
Leading organizations are becoming bolder in using this technology to support innovative business
processes, rather than refining current ways of doing work. [1]

Reengineering guidance and relationship of Mission and Work Processes to Information Technology.

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is basically the fundamental rethinking and radical re-design,
made to an organizations existing resources. It 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. [1]

Within the framework of this basic assessment of mission and goals, reengineering focuses on the
organization's business processes—the 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. Reengineering identifies, analyzes, and redesigns an organization's core business processes
with the aim of achieving dramatic improvements in critical performance measures, such as cost, quality,
service, and speed.[1]

Reengineering 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, reengineering focuses on redesigning 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 rethinking how the organization's work should be done distinguishes
reengineering from process improvement efforts that focus on functional or incremental improvement. [1]

[edit]History

In 1990, Michael Hammer, a former professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology (MIT), published an article in the Harvard Business Review, in which he claimed that the
major challenge for managers is to obliterate non-value adding work, rather than using technology for
automating it.[2] This statement implicitly accused managers of having focused on the wrong issues,
namely that technology in general, and more specifically information technology, has been used primarily
for automating existing processes rather than using it as an enabler for making non-value adding work
obsolete.

Hammer's claim was simple: Most of the work being done does not add any value for customers, and this
work should be removed, not accelerated through automation. Instead, companies should reconsider their
processes in order to maximize customer value, while minimizing the consumption of resources required
for delivering their product or service. A similar idea was advocated by Thomas H. Davenport and J. Short
in 1990[3], at that time a member of the Ernst & Young research center, in a paper published in the Sloan
Management Review the same year as Hammer published his paper.

This idea, to unbiasedly review a company’s business processes, was rapidly adopted by a huge number
of firms, which were striving for renewed competitiveness, which they had lost due to the market entrance
of foreign competitors, their inability to satisfy customer needs, and their insufficient cost structure [citation
needed]
. Even well established management thinkers, such as Peter Druckerand Tom Peters, were
accepting and advocating BPR as a new tool for (re-)achieving success in a dynamic world [citation needed].
During the following years, a fast growing number of publications, books as well as journal articles, were
dedicated to BPR, and many consulting firms embarked on this trend and developed BPR methods.
However, the critics were fast to claim that BPR was a way to dehumanize the work place, increase
managerial control, and to justify downsizing, i.e. major reductions of the work force [4], and a rebirth
of Taylorism under a different label.

Despite this critique, reengineering was adopted at an accelerating pace and by 1993, as many as 65% of
the Fortune 500 companies claimed to either have initiated reengineering efforts, or to have plans to do
so[citation needed]. This trend was fueled by the fast adoption of BPR by the consulting industry, but also by the
study Made in America[citation needed], conducted by MIT, that showed how companies in many US industries
had lagged behind their foreign counterparts in terms of competitiveness, time-to-market and productivity.

[edit]Development after 1995

With the publication of critiques in 1995 and 1996 by some of the early BPR proponents [citation needed],
coupled with abuses and misuses of the concept by others, the reengineering fervor in the U.S. began to
wane. Since then, considering business processes as a starting point for business analysis and redesign
has become a widely accepted approach and is a standard part of the change methodology portfolio, but
is typically performed in a less radical way as originally proposed.

More recently, the concept of Business Process Management (BPM) has gained major attention in the
corporate world and can be considered as a successor to the BPR wave of the 1990s, as it is evenly
driven by a striving for process efficiency supported by information technology. Equivalently to the critique
brought forward against BPR, BPM is now accused[citation needed] of focusing on technology and disregarding
the people aspects of change.

[edit]Business process reengineering topics

[edit]Definition

Different definitions can be found. This section contains the definition provided in notable publications in
the field:

 "... 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."[5]
 "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."[6]

Additionally, Davenport (ibid.) points out the major difference between BPR and other approaches to
organization development (OD), especially the continuous improvement or TQM movement, when he
states: "Today firms must seek not fractional, but multiplicative levels of improvement – 10x rather than
10%." Finally, Johansson[7] provide a description of BPR relative to other process-oriented views, such
as Total Quality Management (TQM) and Just-in-time (JIT), and state:

 "Business Process Reengineering, although a close relative, seeks radical rather than merely
continuous improvement. It escalates the efforts of JIT and TQM to make process orientation a
strategic tool and a core competence of the organization. BPR concentrates on core business
 processes, and uses the specific techniques within the JIT and TQM ”toolboxes” as enablers, while
broadening the process vision."

In order to achieve the major improvements BPR is seeking for, the change of structural organizational
variables, and other ways of managing and performing work is often considered as being insufficient. For
being able to reap the achievable benefits fully, the use of information technology (IT) is conceived as a
major contributing factor. While IT traditionally has been used for supporting the existing business
functions, i.e. it was used for increasing organizational efficiency, it now plays a role as enabler of new
organizational forms, and patterns of collaboration within and between organizations [citation needed].

BPR derives its existence from different disciplines, and four major areas can be identified as being
subjected to change in BPR - organization, technology, strategy, and people - where a process view is
used as common framework for considering these dimensions. The approach can be graphically depicted
by a modification of "Leavitt’s diamond".[8]

Business strategy is the primary driver of BPR initiatives and the other dimensions are governed by
strategy's encompassing role. The organization dimension reflects the structural elements of the
company, such as hierarchical levels, the composition of organizational units, and the distribution of work
between them[citation needed]. Technology is concerned with the use of computer systems and other forms
of communication technology in the business. In BPR, information technology is generally considered as
playing a role as enabler of new forms of organizing and collaborating, rather than supporting existing
business functions. The people / human resources dimension deals with aspects such as education,
training, motivation and reward systems. The concept of business processes - interrelated activities
aiming at creating a value added output to a customer - is the basic underlying idea of BPR. These
processes are characterized by a number of attributes: Process ownership, customer focus, value adding,
and cross-functionality.

[edit]The role of information technology

Information technology (IT) has historically played an important role in the reengineering concept [citation
needed]
. It is considered by some as a major enabler for new forms of working and collaborating within an
organization and across organizational borders.

Early BPR literature [9] identified several so called disruptive technologies that were supposed to

challenge traditional wisdom about how work should be performed.

 Shared databases, making information available at many places

 Expert systems, allowing generalists to perform specialist tasks
 Telecommunication networks, allowing organizations to be centralized and decentralized at the
same time
 Decision-support tools, allowing decision-making to be a part of everybody's job
 Wireless data communication and portable computers, allowing field personnel to work office
independent
 Interactive videodisk, to get in immediate contact with potential buyers
 Automatic identification and tracking, allowing things to tell where they are, instead of requiring to
be found
 High performance computing, allowing on-the-fly planning and revisioning

In the mid 1990s, especially workflow management systems were considered as a significant contributor
to improved process efficiency. Also ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) vendors, such asSAP, JD
Edwards, Oracle, PeopleSoft, positioned their solutions as vehicles for business process redesign and
improvement.

[edit]Research & Methodology

Although the labels and steps differ slightly, the early methodologies that were rooted in IT-centric BPR
solutions share many of the same basic principles and elements. The following outline is one such model,
based on the PRLC (Process Reengineering Life Cycle) approach developed by Guha. [10].
Simplified schematic outline of using a business process approach, examplified for pharmceutical R&D:
1. Structural organization with functional units
2. Introduction of New Product Development as cross-functional process
3. Re-structuring and streamlining activities, removal of non-value adding tasks

Benefiting from lessons learned from the early adopters, some BPR practitioners advocated a change in
emphasis to a customer-centric, as opposed to an IT-centric, methodology. One such methodology, that
also incorporated a Risk and Impact Assessment to account for the impact that BPR can have on jobs
and operations, was described by Lon Roberts (1994) [citation needed]. Roberts also stressed the use of change
management tools to proactively address resistance to change—a factor linked to the demise of many
reengineering initiatives that looked good on the drawing board.

Some items to use on a process analysis checklist are: Reduce handoffs, Centralize data, Reduce
delays, Free resources faster, Combine similar activities. Also within the management consulting industry,
a significant number of methodological approaches have been developed. [11]

[edit]Critique

Reengineering has earned a bad reputation because such projects have often resulted in massive
layoffs[citation needed]. This reputation is not altogether unwarranted, since companies have often downsized
under the banner of reengineering. Further, reengineering has not always lived up to its expectations. The
main reasons seem to be that:

 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 Eliyahu M. Goldratt (and his Theory of Constraints) reengineering does not provide
an effective way to focus improvement efforts on the organization's constraint [citation needed].

There was considerable hype surrounding the introduction of Reengineering the Corporation (partially due
to the factthat the authors of the book reportedly[citation needed] bought numbers of copies to promote it to the
top of bestseller lists).

Abrahamson (1996) showed 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). Dubois (2002) highlights the
value of signaling terms as Reengineering, giving it a name, and stimulating it. At the same there can be a
danger in usage of such fashionable concepts as mere ammunition to implement particular reform. Read
Article by Faraz Rafique. 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." [12]

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." [13]

Other criticism brought forward against the BPR concept include

 It never changed management thinking, actually the largest causes of failure in an organization
 lack of management support for the initiative and thus poor acceptance in the organization.
 exaggerated expectations regarding the potential benefits from a BPR initiative and consequently
failure to achieve the expected results.
 underestimation of the resistance to change within the organization.
 implementation of generic so-called best-practice processes that do not fit specific company
needs.
 overtrust in technology solutions.
 performing BPR as a one-off project with limited strategy alignment and long-term perspective.
 poor project management.