Page 91 - DCAP306_DCAP511_E-COMMERCE_AND_E-BUSINESS

E-Commerce and E-Business

7.1 Business Process Reengineering (BPR)

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is a management approach that aims at enhancements to increase
effectiveness and efficiency of processes:
1. Within the public organizations
2. Across the public organizations

3. From public organizations to businesses
4. From public organizations to citizens
BPR came into being in the early 1990s when James Champy and Michael Hammer published their best-
selling book named “Reengineering the Corporation”. Both the authors promoted the concept that
reorganization and radical redesign of an enterprise was essential to bring down the cost and enhance
the quality of service.
Champy and Hammer felt that the workflow design in almost all large corporations was based on
assumptions about organizational goals, people, and technology that were no longer valid. They
suggested seven values of reengineering to streamline work processes and achieve significant
improvement in time management, quality, and cost.
The seven principles of reengineering suggested by Champy and Hammer were:

1. Organize outcomes and not tasks.
2. Determine all the organizational processes and prioritize them in case of redesign urgency.
3. Integrate the information processing task into real work to produce the information.
4. Consider geographically the dispersed resources as centralized ones.
5. Establish relationships between parallel activities in workflow instead of combining their results.
6. Consider the task performed as decision point and build control into that process.

7. Capture details once.
By mid 1990s, BPR was popularly considered a good way of “downsizing”. Hammer considered lack of
leadership, sustained management commitment, and unrealistic expectations as the factors that were
the main causes for the abandonment of BPR. This prompted businesses to embrace the methodology
named Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).
Apart from managing a business process in any of the business information systems, it is essential to
improve the value of the process and the methods used in enhancing the process. Business process
consists of the tasks that make up a business activity.

Business process involved in license application.

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