Business Process Reengineering - Its Relevance and Role to the 21st Century Companies

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Business Process Reengineering – Its Relevance and Role to the 21st Century Companies

  1. Overview of the Current Business Environment

The three Cs - Customer, Competition, and Change - have created a new world for business.  It is increasingly apparent that organization designed to operate in one environment can’t operate too well in another.  The environment that organizations are facing now involves “Mass Customisation”, which is totally different from the previous “Mass Production” age.  According to Turban and McLean (1992), “Mass Production was the age that company produced a large quantity of identical, standard product for future distribution to the customer.”  The philosophy of mass production is to produce low cost and inexpensive product for the customers by utilizing economies-of-scale.

Now, the trend has moved to Mass Customisation.  The basic concept of mass customization is to enable a company producing large volumes, to customize the product to the specification of individual customer (Pine, 1993).   Mass customisation drives the company to be lean, nimble, flexible, responsive, competitive, innovative, effective, customer-focused, and profitable.

In order to fit with the current environment, the company has to think of ways to adapt to the change. That means, the company must transform from “Mass Production” to “Mass Customisation”. A solution to this is Business Process Reengineering (BPR).  According to Hammer and Champy (1993), BPR 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.” It can help the company to achieve dramatic improvements in product, quality, customer satisfaction, and job satisfaction. That is, it can help the company to survive in today’s business environment.

Reengineering is about rejecting the conventional wisdom and the assumptions of the past.  It is about inventing new approaches to process structure that bear little or no resemblance to those of previous eras.

In the real world, organizations have some misunderstanding about BPR.  If correct understanding is gained, the success of BPR can be assured.  This research has an intention of presenting useful guidelines in the application of BPR and exploring the role of Information Technology (IT) within the BPR environment.

  1. Objectives of the Research

2.1 Aim

The aim of the research is to analyze the effects of BPR to the leading companies of the 21st Century.

  1. Specific Objectives

To achieve the aim, the following specific objectives have to be met:

  • To analyze how BPR theory is applied in practice, through the use of existing case studies

  • To explore the role of IT in BPR environment.

  • To identify the positive and negative factors that could affect the implementation of BPR.

  • To identify solutions and recommendations for successful implementation of BPR.
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BPR was first formalized by Hammer as a completed concept in 1993. The first definition presented is said to describe the root of BPR. This research sticks to the basic definition of BPR as based on Hammer and Champy’s view.

BPR can be seen as a part of management science. Its concept is complex. According to James Champy (1995), BPR is related to several sections, such as the leadership management, the knowledge management, process management, organization behaviour and human resource management, Information Technology and so on.  Due to the limited time and resource, this report just focuses ...

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