Term Paper on: Business Process Re-Engineering (Bpr)

Re- engineering is the basis for many recent developments in management.

The cross-functional team, for example, has become popular because of the sire to re-engineer separate functional tasks into complete cross-functional processes. 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 re-engineering is also known as business process redesign, business transformation, or business process change management.

BACKGROUND Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) has been a management concept since the late 1 sass. Its popularity was greatly accelerated by an article published by Hammer in the Harvard Business Review . The BPR strategy propounded by Hammer focused on organization and management changes to bring about Radical business improvements.Another school of thought championed by Researchers such as Davenport and Pentagram advocated the use of IT as an important business process enabler leading to significant improvements in Productivity. However, most of the BPR research works in the early and mid-asses were strategic in nature, pioneered largely by the business management gurus from Harvard and MIT and focused mainly on dyadic organizational changes.

Many of these strategic management approaches do not relate the formulation of company strategies to their deployment via the company business processes at the tactical and operational levels.Over the past five years, Gigantic has been involved in several business processes Reengineering projects in different industrial sectors and with varying scope, Most of which resulted in the selection of appropriate enterprise solutions to support the reengineering processes? OVERVIEW Business process re-engineering (BPR) began as a private sector technique to alp organizations fundamentally rethink how they do their work in order to dramatically improve customer service, cut operational costs, and become world-class competitor.A key stimulus for re-engineering 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. [pick] Reengineering guidance and relationship of Mission and Work Processes to Information Technology. Business Process Re-engineering (PAR) s basically the fundamental re-thinking and radical re-design, made to an organization's 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.

Within the framework of this basic assessment of mission and goals, re- engineering 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. Re- engineering identifies, analyzes, and re-designs an organization's core business processes with the aim of achieving dramatic improvements in critical performance measures, such as cost, quality, service, and speed. Re- engineering recognizes that an organization's business processes are usually fragmented into sub processes 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.

Re-engineering maintains that optimizing the performance of sub processes can result in some benefits, but cannot yield dramatic improvements if the process itself is fundamentally inefficient and outmoded. For that reason, re-engineering 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 re-thinking how the organization's work should be done distinguishes re-engineering from process improvement efforts that focus on functional or incremental improvement. HISTORY In 1 990, 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.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,at that time a member of the Ernst & Young research center, in a paper published in the Sloan Management Review This idea, to unbiased 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.