Reengineering

1 Reengineering Introduction.

1.1 History:

The concept of reengineering beginning in 90’s when the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology (MIT) conducted research entitled "Management in 1990". The purpose of this

research is to know the role played by information technology organizations in that time. In the

same year a group of researchers to the institution CSC Advisory Services conducted research to

examine the nature of the relationship between information technology and organizational

change. In the summer the same year all of Davenport and Short, published an article entitled

"The new industrial engineering: information technology and process reengineering of the

organization", and then immediately thereafter Hammer article entitled "Reengineering." And

spread the concept of reengineering largely in the American management culture when each of

the Hammer and Champy published the first book in the reengineering entitled "Reengineering

the Corporation". And confirms many of the authors is that the entrance to the beginning of the

reengineering resulted in the field of information technology and spread strongly in all functional

areas within the organization. Davenport believes that there are many approaches and methods

that led to the emergence of the entrance to the reengineering and contributed to the formation of

foundations and principles, as follows: Introduction of Total Quality and Industrial Engineering.

The entrance to the reengineering has raised a lot of controversy and disagreement among

the authors, some authors such as Drucker believed that the entrance of new and innovative

should be applied, while others feel it is a management fad has spread in the area of the

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management culture and it soon disappeared, while a third group believes that entrance to the

reengineering presented a set of ideas, including what is new and innovative and some are old

and bis.

1.2 Definition:

There are a set of definitions can be found it in the concept of reengineering, cause of that

several authors have provided their own interpretation of the changes being applied to

organizations, for example:

• Davenport and Short (1990) have described Reengineering as the analysis and design of work

flows and processes within and between organizations.

• Other authors such as Talwar (1993) have focused on the rethinking, restructuring and

streamlining of the business structure, processes, methods of working, management systems

and external relationships through which value is created and delivered.

• Petrozzo and Stepper (1994) on the other hand, believe that Reengineering involves the

concurrent redesign of processes, organizations, and their supporting information systems to

achieve radical improvement in time, cost, quality, and customers’ regard for the company’s

products and services.

• While Lowenthal (1994) describes the fundamental rethinking and redesign of operating

processes and organizational structure, the focus is on the organization's core competencies, to

achieve dramatic improvements in organizational performance.

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1.3 Reengineering Formally Defined:

As we saw there are many different definitions for Reengineering but most of them have

the same meaning or idea. The most popular of these definitions 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 ,” Hammer and

Champy said.

A quick look at this definition we can observe that it contains about four essential points

can be summarized as follows:

1. Fundamental Rethinking : In doing reengineering, businesspeople must ask the most basic

question about their companies and how they operate; Why do we do what we do? And why

do we do it the way we do? Asking these fundamental questions forces people to look at the

tacit rules and assumptions that underlie the way they conduct their businesses. Often, these

rules turn out to be obsolete, erroneous, or inappropriate. Reengineering begins with no

assumptions and no givens; in fact, companies that undertake reengineering must guard

against the assumptions that most processes already have embedded in them. To ask “How

can we perform customer credit checks more efficiently?” assumes that customer credit must

be checked. In many instance, the cost of checking may, in fact, exceed the bad-debt losses

that checking avoids. Reengineering first determines what a company must do, then how to

do it. Reengineering takes nothing for granted. It ignores what is and concentrates on what

should be.

2. Radical Redesign : Radical redesign means getting to the root of things: not making

superficial changes or fiddling with what is already in place, but throwing away the old. In

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reengineering, radical redesign means disregarding all existing structures and procedures and

inventing completely new ways of accomplishing work. Reengineering is about business

reinvention - not business improvement, business enhancement, or business modification.

3. Dramatic improvements : Reengineering is not about making marginal or incremental

improvements but about achieving quantum leaps in performance. If a company falls 10

percent short of where it should be, if its cost come in 10 percent too high, if its quality is 10

percent boost, that company does not need reengineering. More conventional methods, from

exhorting the troops to establishing incremental quality programs, can dig a company out of a

10 percent hole. Reengineering should be brought in only when a need exists for heavy

blasting. Marginal improvement requires fine-tuning; dramatic improvement demands

blowing up the old and replacing it with something new.

4. Processes : Although this word is the most important in our definition, it is also the one that

gives most corporate managers the greatest difficulty. Most businesspeople are not ”process-

oriented”; they are focused on tasks, on jobs, on people, on structures, but not on processes.

We define a business process as a collection of activities that takes one or more kinds of input

and creates an output that is of value to the customer. Reengineering is characterized by the

principle of focusing on work systems and processes or what is known as the chairperson of

the companies and institutions, not departments, as they are studying and reengineering the

entire operations from receipt of the request the client till to be the completion of the

requested service. Therefore reengineering help to see the full picture of the work and

moving between the various departments and knowledge of operational and regulatory

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barriers that hinder the work and prolong the time needed to provide the service and finish

the work. Example for reengineered process:

• Traditional Process of Goods and Services Procurement:

Needanalysis

Draft of contract and documents for tender

Supplierselection

Contract draw up

Goods and services

supply

Probable case and liberation

with supplier

Payment

• New Process of Goods and Services Procurement:

On Line OrderGoods

and services supply

PaymentNeed

analysis

1.4 Why Reengineering?

“You do not reengineer unless you have to,” and these days, almost everyone has to. In

reengineering the corporation, the driving forces behind reengineering were characterized as the

three Cs: customers, competition, and change. Customers have become much more sophisticated

and demanding; they have a much greater range of alternatives, are much more knowledgeable

about their own needs, and are exerting ever greater pressure on their suppliers. Competition,

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which at one time was local and relatively gentle, has become global and cutthroat. Whether in

geopolitical realities, technology, or customer preferences, the pace of change is dizzying. what

was unthinkable yesterday is routine today.

In a world of rapid flux, organization must change their priorities from a traditional focus

on planning, control, and managed growth, to emphasize speed, innovation, flexibility, quality,

service, and cost. It is virtually impossible to retrofit organizations into this new reality.

Reengineering is the only solution.

1.5 What It Is Not.

Reengineering is not reorganizing. Modifying how an organization is structured and

redesigning an organization’s business processes are two different things. An organizational

structure should be designed so that it best supports redesigned business processes.

Reengineering is not downsizing either. By the mid 1990s, reengineering had gained a

reputation for being synonymous with dramatic reductions in staff. This was never its intention.

Downsizing focuses on the reduction of workforce to achieve short-term cost savings. Remedies

such as across-the-board budget cuts, hiring and salary freezes, and reorganization do not address

the systemic issues behind poor government processes. Reengineering, on the other hand,

focuses on rethinking from the ground up, finding more efficient ways of working including

eliminating work that is unnecessary. Rather than eliminating employees, it focuses on

optimizing efforts and getting rid of non-value-added activities.

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2 Business Process Reengineering BPR.

2.1 When To Use BPR.

BPR is not practical for every organizational process. There are several guidelines that

need to be analyzed before beginning to reengineer a process. Before the organization can choose

a process to reengineer, they must identify the different processes in the organization.

After defining the processes, the organization must decide which processes are in the worst

shape. The next step is to determine which process affects customers the most. The final step is

to determine which processes are most likely to accept change.

These steps are general guidelines to use after determining that reengineering is

appropriate. The decision to reengineer will probably rest with senior level management. Some

reasons to reengineer include survival in a changing market place, halting a decline in

productivity or sales, or maintaining a competitive edge.

2.2 The Principles of BPR.

In Hammer and Champy’s original Manifesto reengineering was by definition radical; it

could not simply be an enhancement or modification of what went before. It examined work in

terms of outcomes, not tasks or unit functions, and it expected dramatic, rather than marginal

improvements. Following are seven principles of reengineering, suggested by the authors, that

would streamline work processes, achieve savings, and improve product quality and time

management.

1. Organize around outcomes, not tasks.

2. Identify all the processes in an organization and prioritize them in order of redesign urgency.

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3. Integrate information processing work into the real work that produces information.

4. Treat geographically dispersed resources as though they were centralized.

5. Link parallel activities in the workflow instead of just integrating their results.

6. Put the decision point where the work is performed, and build control into the process.

7. Capture information once and at the source.

2.3 The Benefits of BPR.

The hard task of re-examining mission and how it is being delivered on a day-to-day basis

will have fundamental impacts on an organization, especially in terms of responsiveness and

accountability to customers and stakeholders. The rewards of reengineering are many including:

• empowering employees;

• eliminating waste, unnecessary management overhead, and obsolete or inefficient processes;

• producing often significant reductions in cost and cycle times;

• enabling revolutionary improvements in many business processes as measured by quality and

customer service;

• helping top organizations stay on top and low-achievers to become effective competitors.

2.4 The BPR Vision.

According to Department of Defense (DoD’s) Planning for Business Process

Reengineering, BPR is based on a horizontally structured enterprise organized around key

business processes. Following are features of the BPR vision:

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• Shared information: Information must be maintained, managed, and made available when it is

needed for critical decision-making.

• Mission support: When business processes are redesigned they should strengthen mission

support. Those that do not add value to mission achievement should be eliminated.

• Functional leadership: Reengineering can be risky. Recent surveys estimate the percentage of

BPR failures to be between 50% and 70%. If there is one message that has been reinforced

over and over, it is the need for executive-level leadership and commitment to the process. All

federal agency heads must participate in and take responsibility for the management of his or

her agency’s core processes. Without leadership throughout the Department, process

improvement efforts will falter.

• Reduced cost: Activities that increase the cost of doing business but provide no benefits to

stakeholders are to be reduced or eliminated.

• Reusable technology: There should be a shift from custom-developed, unique information

management systems to the use of off-the-shelf technologies that support standard business

processes.

• Single interface: Federal agencies should have to master only one system interface for

accessing their agency’s information resources.

• Just-in-time: Information, training, and support should be delivered electronically to the work

site at the precise time they are needed.

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2.5 Reengineering: A Functional Management Approach.

Reengineering can generate a significant change in product and service requirements, a

significant change in controls or constraints imposed on a business process, or a significant

change in the technological platform that supports the business process. Implementation of a

reengineering initiative usually has considerable impacts across organizational boundaries, as

well as impacts on suppliers and customers. For this reason, it requires both a sensitivity to

employee attitudes as well as to the ramifications of change on their lives. Department of

Defense (DoD) has suggested that the following tasks be part of any functional management

approach to reengineering projects:

Step 1 : Define

Define functional objectives, determine and follow a functional management strategy for

streamlining and standardizing processes, and establish process, data, and information systems

baselines from which to begin process improvement. A framework is established by defining

these baselines, objectives, and strategies.

Step 2 : Analyze

Analyze business processes to eliminate non-value-added processes, simplify and streamline

limited value added processes, and examine all processes to identify more effective and efficient

alternatives to the process, data, and system baselines.

Step 3 : Evaluate

Evaluate alternatives to baseline processes through a preliminary functional economic analysis to

select a preferred course of action.

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Step 4 : Plane

Plan implementation of the preferred course of action by developing detailed statements of

requirements, baseline impacts, costs, benefits, and schedule.

Step 5 : Approve

Extract from the planning data the information needed to finalize the functional economic

analysis, which is used by senior management to approve proceeding with the proposed

process improvements and any associated data or system changes.

Step 6 : Execute

Execute the approved process and data changes, and provide functional management oversight of

any associated information system changes.

2.6 BPR By Any Other Name.

Although the original definition of BPR focused on the “radical” redesign of business

processes, Hammer and Champy now view the most important word in the definition to be

“process” a complete end-to-end set of activities that together create value for a customer.

Subsequently, BPR has evolved in recent years to reconcile with more incremental approaches,

such as Total Quality Management (TQM). Many other concepts, including knowledge

management, employee empowerment, and benchmarking have been integrated into the BPR

model, and there has been a new emphasis given to slow but steady process improvements as

opposed to extreme overhauls.

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2.7 Reengineering and Information Technology.

Reengineering and automating a process are not the same thing. As Hammer and Champy

point out, automating is often little more than “paving the cowpaths” of processes that are

redundant or inefficient. This is not what reengineering is about.

Many organizations have spent millions of dollars on information technology, automating

existing processes, without determining whether or not those processes were even necessary.

Only after business processes have been streamlined and redesigned, should automation be

applied.

Reengineering must work hand-in-hand with information technology to consider cutting-

edge innovations things never attempted before. In a reengineering project, IT is an “essential

enabler.” Many processes cannot be reengineered without it. In keeping with reengineering’s

“ambitious” approach, information technology should be anticipatory; it should answer problems

the consumer does not know he has yet.

2.8 The Top Ten Mistakes In BPR.

The proximate causes for BPR failure are enormously divers. Organization have an

amazing ability to find new ways of making mistakes. However, failure most often results from

one underlying problem: The people engaged in the reengineering effort do not know what they

are doing. They misconstrue or fail to comprehend the fundamental nature of reengineering.

Their techniques are improvised or random, not based on practical experience. If you do not have

a clear understanding of what reengineering is and how it work, you should hardly be surprised if

your efforts end up in trouble.

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1. The first of these mistakes is to say you are reengineering without actually doing it. Many

people complain to us: “You told us if we reengineered we would achieve dramatic results,

but we have not achieved dramatic result.” Upon examination it becomes clear they were

never truly reengineering in the first place. They did something else and merely called it

reengineering.

2. The second mistake is a variation of the first-trying to apply reengineering where it cannot

fit. People often tell us they are reengineering their sales department or the accounting

organization. None of these statements have any meaning. You cannot reengineer an

organization. The verb “to reengineer” takes as its object a business process and nothing else.

3. The third one is to spend far too much time analyzing existing processes. Before

organizations can create new designs, they do need to understand their current processes.

However, too many people confuse understanding with conducting a full-scale analysis.

What is the difference between analysis and understanding?. Understanding means achieving

a high-level, goal-oriented overview of an existing process, one that provides you with just

enough information to begin with a clean sheet of paper. Analysis, involves the detailed

documentation of virtually every aspect of the current process.

4. The fourth common mistake is to attempt reengineering without the requisite leadership.

Strong, committed, executive leadership is the absolute important for reengineering. Only a

senior executive who deeply believes in the reengineering cause actually make it happen.

People at lower level of the organization, no matter how smart do not have the perspective

needed to see whole process and their shortcomings, nor the clout to institute the kinds of far-

reaching changes that reengineering top-down phenomenon.

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5. The fifth mistake is timidity in redesign. Reengineering requires bold and imaginative

thinking about process design and how work is done, and many people worry that coming up

with these new ideas is the hardest part of reengineering.

6. Mistake number six occurs when you attempt to go from a new process design directly into

implementation. No matter how smart you are, or how much experience you may have had

with reengineering, there is no way that the design that you create is going to be identical to

the design that you implement.

7. The seventh is not reengineering quickly enough. From the time that you start thinking about

a process until you have some concrete business benefits to show for it should never be more

than twelve months.

8. Mistake eight occurs when you limit the range of the reengineering effort, placing parts of

the organization off-limits. If you radically redesign your processes but refuse to change the

compensation plan, the structure of the organization, or job titles, then you will certainly fail.

It is inevitable.

9. The ninth mistake to failure is to adopt the wrong style of implementation. Many companies

feel that they have to get all their ducks neatly lined up in a row before they begin a

reengineering effort.

10. The final common mistake is failing to attend to the concerns of the people in the

organization. Reengineering can behave too much like real engineers, and that behavior can

have serious consequences for reengineering implementation.

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We can summarized the top ten ways to fail at reengineering as follows:

I. Do not reengineer but say that you are.

II. Do not focus on process.

III. Spend a lot of time analyzing the current situation.

IV. Proceed without strong executive leadership.

V. Be timid in redesign.

VI. Go directly from conceptual design to implementation.

VII. Reengineering slowly.

VIII.Place some aspects of the business off-limits.

IX. Adopt a conventional implementation style.

X. Ignore the concerns of your people.

3 Reengineering Methodology.

3.1 Reengineering Process.

According to many in the BPR field reengineering should focus on processes and not be

limited to thinking about the organizations. After all the organization is only as effective as its

processes. So, what is a process? “A business process is a series of steps designed to produce a

product or a service. It includes all the activities that deliver particular results for a given

customer (external or internal).” Processes are currently invisible and unnamed because people

think about the individual departments more often than the process with which all of them are

involved. So companies that are currently used to talking in terms of departments such as

marketing and manufacturing must switch to giving names to the processes that they do such that

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they express the beginning and end states. These names should imply all the work that gets done

between the start and finish. For example, order fulfillment can be called order to payment

process.

Talking about the importance of processes just as companies have organization charts,

they should also have what are called process maps to give a picture of how work flows through

the company. Process mapping provides tools and a proven methodology for identifying your

current As-Is business processes and can be used to provide a To-Be roadmap for reengineering

your product and service business enterprise functions. It is the critical link that your

reengineering team can apply to better understand and significantly improve your business

processes and bottom-line performance.

Having identified and mapped the processes, deciding which ones need to be

reengineered and in what order is the million-dollar question. No company can take up the

unenviable task of reengineering all the processes simultaneously. Generally they make there

choices based on three criteria:

• Dysfunction: which processes are functioning the worst?

• Importance: which are the most critical and influential in terms of customer satisfaction.

• Feasibility: which are the processes that are most likely to be successfully reengineered.

3.2 Five Methodologies.

With an understanding of the basics of BPR, five methodologies are summarized in these five

tables:

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Table 1: A few BPR methodologies from contemporary literature.

Action Methodology 1

1 Develop vision & strategy

2 Create desired culture

3 Integrate & Improve enterprise

4 Develop technology solutions

Table 2 : A few BPR methodologies from contemporary literature.

Action Methodology 2

1 Determine Customer Requirements &Goals for the Process

2 Map and Measure the Existing Process

3 Analyze and Modify Existing Process

4 Design a Reengineered Process

5 Implement the Reengineered Process

Table 3 : A few BPR methodologies from contemporary literature.

Action Methodology 3

1 Set Direction

2 Baseline and Benchmark

3 Create The Vision

4 Launch Problem Solving Projects

5 Design Improvements

6 Implement Change

7 Embed Continuous Improvement

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Table 4 : A few BPR methodologies from contemporary literature.

Action Methodology 4

1 Motivating Reengineering

2 Justifying Reengineering

3 Planning Reengineering

4 Setting up for Reengineering

5 As Is Description & Analysis

6 To-Be Design and Validation

7 Implementation

Table 5 : A few BPR methodologies from contemporary literature.

Action Methodology 5

1 Preparation

2 Identification

3 Vision

4 Technical & Social design

5 Transformation

3.3 Consolidation Methodology.

A consolidated methodology has been developed from the five methodologies previously

presented and an integration definition model was developed to provide a structured approach

and to facilitate understanding. But for the sake of brevity, we have shown only the major

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activities in the integration definition model in Figure 1. In the ensuing section, we deal with the

details of our methodology.

Prepare for BPR

• Build cross functional team

• Identify customer driven objective

• develop strategic purpose

Map&Analyze As-Is Process

• Create activity models

• Create process models

• Simulate & perform ABC

• Identify disconnects & value adding process

Design To-Be Processes

• Benchmark processes

• Design To-Be processes

• Validate To-Be processes

• Perform trade-off analysis

Implement Reengineering

Processes

• Evolve Implementation plan

• Prototype & simulate transition plans

• Initiate training programs

• Implement transition plane

Improve Continuously

• Initiate ongoing measurement

• Review performance against target

• Improve process continuously

Figure 1 BPR: The surest way to the Top!

Action 1: Prepare for Reengineering.

“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. Planning and Preparation are vital factors for any

action or event to be successful, and reengineering is no exception. Before attempting

reengineering, the question ‘Is BPR necessary?’ should be asked? There should be a significant

need for the process to be reengineered. The justification of this need marks the beginning of the

Preparation action.

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This action begins with the development of executive consensus on the importance of

reengineering and the link between breakthrough business goals and reengineering projects. A

mandate for change is produced and a cross functional team is established with a game plan for

the process of reengineering. While forming the cross functional team, steps should be taken to

ensure that the organization continues to function in the absence of several key players. As

typical BPR projects involve cross-functional cooperation and significant changes to the status

quo, the planning for organizational changes is difficult to conduct without strategic direction

from the top. The impact of the environmental changes that serve as the impetus for the

reengineering effort must also be considered in establishing guidelines for the reengineering

project. Another important factor to be considered while establishing the strategic goals for the

reengineering effort, is to make it your first priority to understand the expectations of your

customers and where your existing process falls short of meeting those requirements. Having

identified the customer driven objectives, the mission or vision statement is formulated. The

vision is what a company believes it wants to achieve when it is done, and a well defined vision

will sustain a company’s resolve through the stress of the reengineering process. It can act as the

flag around which to rally the troops when the morale begins to sag and it provides the yard stick

for measuring the company’s progress.

Action 2 : Map and Analyze As-Is Process.

Before the reengineering team can proceed to redesign the process, they should

understand the existing process. Although some BPR proponents (in particular Hammer and

Champy) argue against analyzing the current enterprise, saying that it inhibits the creative

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process, that might not always hold true. It varies from case to case. While some organizations

which are in dire straits might go the Hammer and Champy way (attempt a new process design

while totally ignoring the existing processes) most organizations need to map the existing

processes first, analyze and improve on it to design new processes. The important aspect of BPR

is that the improvement should provide dramatic results. Many people do not understand the

value of an As-Is analysis and rather prefer to spend a larger chunk of their valuable time on

designing the To-Be model directly. What follows is an illustration that illustrates this fallacy.

A large manufacturer spent six million dollars over a period of one year in a bid to

develop a parts-tracking system and was all set to go online. Only then did he realize that he had

totally overlooked a small piece of information – ‘the mode of transmission of information

between the scheduling staff and the shop floor was through a phone call.’ But just because this

small yet vital information had not been documented all his efforts added up to naught and the

whole system that he had so painstakingly developed had to be scrapped. Alas! He had

recognized the need for an As-Is analysis, way too late.

The main objective of this phase is to identify disconnects (anything that prevents the

process from achieving desired results and in particular information transfer between

organizations or people) and value adding processes. This is initiated by first creation and

documentation of Action and Process models making use of the various modeling methods

available. Then, the amount of time that each action takes and the cost that each action requires

in terms of resources is calculated through simulation and action based costing (ABC). All the

groundwork required having been completed, the processes that need to be reengineered are

identified.

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Action 3 : Design To-Be process.

The objective of this phase is to produce one or more alternatives to the current situation,

which satisfy the strategic goals of the enterprise. The first step in this phase is benchmarking.

“Benchmarking is the comparing of both the performance of the organization’s processes and the

way those processes are conducted with those relevant peer organizations to obtain ideas for

improvement.” The peer organizations need not be competitors or even from the same industry.

Innovative practices can be adopted from anywhere, no matter what their source.

Having identified the potential improvements to the existing processes, the development

of the To-Be models is done using the various modeling methods available, bearing in mind the

principles of process design. Then, similar to the As-Is model, we perform simulation and ABC

to analyze factors like the time and cost involved. It should be noted that this action is an

iterative process and cannot be done overnight. The several To-Be models that are finally arrived

at are validated. By performing Trade off Analysis the best possible To-Be scenarios are selected

for implementation.

Action 4 : Implement Reengineered Process.

The implementation stage is where reengineering efforts meet the most resistance and

hence it is by far the most difficult one. If we expect that the environment would be conducive to

the reengineering effort we are sadly mistaken. The question that confronts us would be,’ If BPR

promises such breath taking results then why wasn’t it adopted much earlier?’ We could expect to

face all kinds of opposition - from blatantly hostile antagonists to passive adversaries: all of them

determined to kill the effort. When so much time and effort is spent on analyzing the current

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processes, redesigning them and planning the migration, it would indeed be prudent to run a

culture change program simultaneously with all the planning and preparation. This would enable

the organization to undergo a much more facile transition. But whatever may be the juncture in

time that the culture change program may be initiated, it should be rooted in our minds that

‘winning the hearts and minds of everyone involved in the BPR effort is most vital for the

success of the effort. Once this has been done, the next step is to develop a transition plan from

the As-Is to the redesigned process. This plan must align the organizational structure, information

systems, and the business policies and procedures with the redesigned processes. “Rapid

implementation of the information system that is required to support a reengineered business

process is critical to the success of the BPR project. The integration definition models that were

created in the As-Is can be mapped to those created during the To-Be and an initial list of change

requirements generated. Additional requirements for the construction of the To-Be components

can be added and the result organized into a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). Recent

developments in BPR software technologies enable automatic migration of these WBS activity

relationships into a process modeling environment. The benefit here is that we can now define

the causal and time sequential relationships between the actions planned.” Using prototyping and

simulation techniques, the transition plan is validated and it’s pilot versions are designed and

demonstrated. Training programs for the workers are initiated and the plan is executed in full

scale.

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Action 5 : Improve Process Continuously.

A process cannot be reengineered overnight. A very vital part in the success of every

reengineering effort lies in improving the reengineered process continuously. The first step in this

action is monitoring. Two things have to be monitored – the progress of action and the results.

The progress of action is measured by seeing how much more informed the people feel, how

much more commitment the management shows and how well the change teams are accepted in

the broader perspective of the organization. This can be achieved by conducting attitude surveys

and discrete ‘fireside chats’ with those initially not directly involved with the change. As for

monitoring the results, the monitoring should include such measures as employee attitudes,

customer perceptions, supplier responsiveness etc. Communication is strengthened throughout

the organization, ongoing measurement is initiated, team reviewing of performance against

clearly defined targets is done and a feedback loop is set up wherein the process is remapped,

reanalyzed and redesigned. Thereby continuous improvement of performance is ensured through

a performance tracking system and application of problem solving skills. Continuous

improvement Total Quality Management and BPR have always been considered mutually

exclusive to each other. But on the contrary, if performed simultaneously they would

complement each other wonderfully well. In fact Total Quality Management can be used as a

tool to handle the various problems encountered during the BPR effort and to continuously

improve the process. In corporations that have not adopted the Total Quality Management culture

as yet, application of Total Quality Management to the newly designed processes should be

undertaken as a part of the reengineering effort.

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Conclusion:

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.

An intense customer focus, superior process design and a strong and motivated leadership

are vital ingredients to the recipe for the success of any business corporation. Reengineering is

the key that every organization should possess to attain these prerequisites to success. BPR

doesn’t offer a miracle cure on a platter. Nor does it provide a painless quick fix. Rather it

advocates strenuous hard work and instigates the people involved to not only to change what

they do but targets at altering their basic way of thinking itself.

Reengineering is the most dramatic, expensive, risky, rewarding process redesign option

available, yet every organization has to consider this improvement option when faced with the

need for significant organizational improvement.

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Reference:

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Guide to Business Transformation, American Management Association, New York, 1994.

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and Sons Inc, New York, 1996.

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1993, 20-23.

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and Sons Inc, New York, 1996.

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management, Quality Management Journal 3 (3), 1996, 20–38.

13. Harrington, H.J., Improving business processes. TQM Magazine February, 1991, 39–44.

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16. Dhillon, B.S., Engineering and Technology Management Tools and Applications, Artech

House Inc., Boston, 2002.

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Managers, New Jersey, 1996.

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20. Donald Shandler, Reengineering the Training Function: How to Align Training with the New

Corporate Agenda, St. Lucie Press, Florida, 1996.

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Changing Our Work and Our Lives, Harper Collins, New York, 1996.

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Automating Processes, Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, 2003.

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Reengineering: Applying Lessons Learned, Prentice Hall,Saddle River, New Jersey, 1997.

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