Business Process Reengineering

MGT485-0601A-15: Global Strategic Management

Ed Siebold

Is reengineering just another management fad or does it offer something of lasting value? Describe specific situations in which you would or would not recommend reengineering as a potential strategy. Be sure to support your answer.

Reengineering 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 (Hammer & Champy, 1993).

Reengineering is not just another management fad. Business Process Reengineering (BPR) has been around for a little over a decade and even though it has gone through some permutations it still has a lot to offer organizations engaged in transforming their processes (Reengineering Concept Paper, 2002). In today's dynamic business environment, where the technology, business processes and fundamentals are radically changing and new practices are redefined on a continuous basis, reengineering has become an essential element for the survival of any business. Reengineering helps a business protect itself from becoming obsolete in today's fast changing world. Basically, BPR or Reengineering is focused on the outcome or what we in the US Army call the "end state".

Following are seven suggested principles of reengineering, that should streamline work processes, achieve savings, and improve product quality and time management.

* Organize around outcomes, not tasks.

* Identify all the processes in an organization and prioritize them in order of redesign urgency.

* Integrate information processing work into the real work that produces information.

* Treat geographically dispersed resources as though they were centralized.

* Link parallel activities in the workflow instead of just integrating their results.

* Put the decision point where the work is performed, and build control into the process.

* Capture information once and at the source.

Currently the US Army is going through a major restructuring effort. This change incorporates many