Process Modeling: Business Process Reengineering
Posted by keremkosaner on 15 April 2008
4. 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.
Different definitions can be found. This section contains the definition provided in notable publications in the field.
Hammer and Champy (1993) define BPR as
“… 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.”
Thomas H. Davenport (1993), another well-known BPR theorist, uses the term process innovation, which he says
”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”.
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 et al. (1993) 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.”
4.1 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 et.al. (1993).
1. Envision new processes
1. Secure management support
2. Identify reengineering opportunities
3. Identify enabling technologies
4. Align with corporate strategy
2. Initiating change
1. Set up reengineering team
2. Outline performance goals
3. Process diagnosis
1. Describe existing processes
2. Uncover pathologies in existing processes
4. Process redesign
1. Develop alternative process scenarios
2. Develop new process design
3. Design HR architecture
4. Select IT platform
5. Develop overall blueprint and gather feedback
5. Reconstruction
1. Develop/install IT solution
2. Establish process changes
6. Process monitoring
1. Performance measurement, including time, quality, cost, IT performance
2. Link to continuous improvement
-> Loop-back to diagnosis
