W-5,6 - Business Process Reengineering (BPR)

Source / Reference:

[1] Harmon. (2002). BPT Case Study: The Xerox Non-Production Procurement BPR Project. Retrieved February 26, 2012 from http://www.bptrends.com/publicationfiles/BPT%20Case%20Study-Xerox%20Procurement%2011-02.pdf 

[2] Davenport, T. H. (2003). Reengineering Revisited - Computerworld. Retrieved February 26, 2012 from http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/82290/Reengineering_Revisited 

[3] Malhotra, Yogesh. "Business Process Redesign: An Overview," IEEE Engineering Management Review, vol. 26, no. 3, Fall 1998.  http://www.brint.com/papers/bpr.htm 

Subject:


Is Business Process Engineering still useful today?


Response:


In my opinion BPR is still viable today. In addition, it might be even more effective today compared to decades ago when BPR first started. Many previous cases mention success stories involving BPR when they completely changed the managing systems when Information Systems/ Information Technology was first introduced. Perhaps BPR was birthed during the times when IT was initially implemented in businesses and enterprises. 


What is BPR? In lame man's terms, it is when a business rethinks and redesigns processes to create improvements. These improvements can either affect cost, quality, service, speed, and many other factors. The underlying goal is that companies use BPR to create competitive advantage. That is to give themselves the upper hand against competitors. There are also many other reasons including, but not limited to, increasing profits and somewhat society's pressure to integrate IT in this technology-laden environment.


Success cases? In the reference, links to success stories of Ford, Xerox, and Texas Instruments (TI) after implementing BPR. Notice that these cases involve relatively large companies. This shows that BPR is only applied to large and maybe to medium sized companies since radical changes usually involve significantly sizeable corporation. This is one of the limitations of BPR implementation.


In contrast to the success cases, there are more BPR cases that fail. This is because everyone started to follow the hype of BPR. They wanted to take that risk of engineering without knowing the consequences. As a result, after following very superficial, theoretical, and very general guidelines of initial BPR the companies suffered loses from possibly four reasons.


1. Lack of sustained management commitment and leadership
2. Unrealistic scope and expectations
3. Resistance to change
4. Ineffective management systems


The reasons for failure are not limited to the top 4 points as stated above. As you can notice, 1-3 all involve people/human resources. This is the perhaps the  largest reason for failure. Companies looked too much into IT/IS and forgot how people should be affected and interact with these technologies. 


There are, however, different technologies and management strategies that evolved from BPR such as Business process management, Total quality management, and the tools that come with these theories. BPR has indeed involved and might have more success and implications to today's economic environment. In conclusion, I would have to agree that BPR has some significance until today.

1