Page 64 - DCAP302_ENTERPRISE_RESOURCE_PLANNING

Enterprise Resource Planning

notes 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. Even well established management thinkers, such as Peter Drucker
and Tom Peters, were accepting and advocating BPR as a new tool for (re)achieving success in
a dynamic world. During the following years, a fast growing number of publications, books as
well as journal articles, was dedicated to BPR, and many consulting firms embarked on this trend
and developed BPR methods.

However, the critics were fast to claim that BPR was a way to dehumanize the work place,
increase managerial control, and to justify downsizing, i.e. major reductions of the work force,
and a rebirth of Taylorism under a different label.

Despite this critique, re-engineering was adopted at an accelerating pace and by 1993, as many
as 65% of the Fortune 500 companies claimed to either have initiated re-engineering efforts, or to
have plans to do so. This trend was fueled by the fast adoption of BPR by the consulting industry,
but also by the study Made in America, conducted by MIT, that showed how companies in
many US industries had lagged behind their foreign counterparts in terms of competitiveness,
time-to-market and productivity.
With the publication of critiques in 1995 and 1996 by some of the early BPR proponents, coupled
with abuses and misuses of the concept by others, the re-engineering fervor in the U.S. began
to wane. Since then, considering business processes as a starting point for business analysis
and redesign has become a widely accepted approach and is a standard part of the change
methodology portfolio, but is typically performed in a less radical way as originally proposed.
More recently, the concept of Business Process Management (BPM) has gained major attention
in the corporate world and can be considered as a successor to the BPR wave of the 1990s, as
it is evenly driven by a striving for process efficiency supported by information technology.
Equivalently to the critique brought forward against BPR, BPM is now accused of focusing on
technology and disregarding the people aspects of change.

3.6 Bpr Life cycle

figure 3.4: Bpr Life cycle

Identify
Processes

Test and
Implement Review,
To-Be Update
Analyze As-Is

Design To-Be

58 LoveLy professionaL university