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Unit 3: Business Process Re-engineering

to target those aspects of culture that are critical to the success of re-engineering implementation. notes
An illustration of this is the case of instituting multi-skilled jobs and job rotations in a culture that
values specialized trade skills. A blanket enforcement of this change will undoubtedly engender
widespread resistance. The recognition that wholesale change of the corporation is likely to fail
led to changes in BPR thinking toward focusing on small leap improvement projects. It is often
easier to achieve consensus among the affected parties in this type of project, which has been
shown to significantly reduce implementation timeline. Although IT is still a key enabler, it has
become less important in revisionist BPR thinking. Peopleled change, rather than system-led
change, is increasingly viewed as critical to achieve project success. In short, the ideal of process
enterprise is still the goal; however, the path to this goal is not in one gigantic step but a series of
smaller steps.

Did u know? Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) began as a private sector technique to
help organizations fundamentally rethink how they do their work in order to dramatically
improve customer service, cut operational costs, and become world-class competitors.

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Case Study Business process re-engineering in the small firm
usiness process re-engineering (BPR) is being attempted by many firms that are
looking for radical gains from the successful redesign of their processes. BPR is
Ba high risk, time consuming activity, with no guarantee of success, and yet many
businesses claim to be re-engineering their processes. There is no universal definition of
BPR, however common components of individual definitions exist. Typical characteristics
of BPR include: the radical redesign of business processes; the deployment of information
technology as an enabler; major disruption to the organization during the process of
re-engineering; and attempts at achieving organization wide improvements in
performance.
As BPR is relatively new there is a lack of empirical research in the field. Of the few studies
conducted, the focus has been on the large organization, and the majority have used the
case study approach on one or a few individual firms. Despite the youth of the field,
certain principles and attempts at establishing a universal re-engineering methodology
have emerged. However, there has been little consideration for the small firm in the
BPR literature. This is confirmed by the small proportion of the literature specifically
encompassing the small business, and of this small amount, even less is written explicitly
for the small firm. There is a need to investigate the small firm arena in order to determine
whether the same principles for BPR apply, or whether a different approach needs to be
taken by a small business looking for radical change.
This study attempts to provide some initial indication of the extendability of the existing
principles and methodologies in the BPR literature to the small firm. A number of BPR
methodologies have been provided, however, the range of firms for which they are devised
is not often stated. It is possible that the characteristics of the small firm are such that a
customised approach to BPR is necessary. In order to investigate this, a case study on a New
Zealand firm consisting of four divisions was conducted. The next section summarises the
literature, including BPR methodologies, and the application of BPR to small firms. The
method used in the study is outlined in the third section, followed by the results from
the case study. Finally the implications of the results are discussed, and conclusions are
drawn.

Source: Davenport 1993; Hammer & Champy, 1993; Grover, Teng & Fiedler, 1993.

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