Page 60 - DCAP302_ENTERPRISE_RESOURCE_PLANNING

Enterprise Resource Planning

notes Parker defines BPR as the analysis and redesign of the business and manufacturing processes
with a view to eliminating the activities that do not add up value. These definitions enable us to
outline the following main characteristics of BPR:
1. Concentration should be given on fundamental problems and not on departments or other
organizational elements.
2. Concentration should be given on processes and less on activities, functions, people and
structures. A process is a total of activities, which take one or several inputs, and creates an
output, which is valuable for the client.
3. A radical approach which presupposes going to the root of things not only making
superficial changes of the existing things but acting by removing what is obsolete and in-
venting new ways of carrying on the activity.
4. Changes that have a spectacular character that is achieving spectacular results and not
simply effecting marginal or gradual improvements.
5. A strong link of BPR with informatics technologies, a very important characteristic which
cannot be seen directly from definitions. The processes introduced through BPR could not
exist without applying informatics technologies.

3.3 concept of Bpr

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.
A key stimulus for re-engineering has been the continuing development and deployment of
sophisticated information systems and networks. Leading organizations are becoming bolder
in using this technology to support innovative business processes, rather than refining current
ways of doing work.
Business process re-engineering is one approach for redesigning the way work is done to better
support the organization’s mission and reduce costs. Re-engineering starts with a high-level
assessment of the organization’s mission, strategic goals, and customer needs. Basic questions
are asked, such as “Does our mission need to be redefined? Are our strategic goals aligned
with our mission? Who are our customers?” An organization may find that it is operating on
questionable assumptions, particularly in terms of the wants and needs of its customers. Only
after the organization rethinks what it should be doing, does it go on to decide how best to do
it.
Within the framework of this basic assessment of mission and goals, re-engineering focuses on
the organization’s business processes – the steps and procedures that govern how resources are
used to create products and services that meet the needs of particular customers or markets. As a
structured ordering of work steps across time and place, a business process can be decomposed
into specific activities, measured, modeled, and improved. It can also be completely redesigned
or eliminated altogether. Re-engineering identifies, analyzes, and redesigns an organization’s
core business processes with the aim of achieving dramatic improvements in critical performance
measures, such as cost, quality, service, and speed.
Re-engineering recognizes that an organization’s business processes are usually fragmented into
sub-processes and tasks that are carried out by several specialized functional areas within the
organization. Often, no one is responsible for the overall performance of the entire process.
Re-engineering maintains that optimizing the performance of sub-processes can result in some
benefits, but cannot yield dramatic improvements if the process itself is fundamentally inefficient
and outmoded. For that reason, re-engineering focuses on redesigning the process as a whole in
order to achieve the greatest possible benefits to the organization and their customers. This drive

54 LoveLy professionaL university