1. Business Process Re-engineering:
2. In today’s ever-changing world, the only thing that doesn’t change is ‘change’ itself. In a world increasingly driven by the three Cs: Customer, Competition and Change.
3. Companies are on the lookout for new solutions for their business problems. Recently, some of the more successful business corporations in the world seem to have hit upon an incredible solution: Business Process Reengineering (BPR).
4. Some of the recent headlines in the popular press read, “Wal-Mart reduces restocking time from six weeks
5. to thirty-six hours.” Hewlett Packard’s assembly time for server computers touches new low- four minutes.”

6. The reason behind these success stories: Business Process Reengineering

7. Re-engineering:

8. “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”.
9. BPR advocates that enterprises go back to the basics and reexamine their very roots. It doesn’t believe in small improvements. Rather it aims at total reinvention.

10. BPR focuses on processes and not on tasks, jobs or people.

11. Re-engineer:

• “A business process is a series of steps designed to produce a product or a service. It includes all the activities that deliver particular results for a given Customer (external or internal)”.
• Talking about the importance of processes just as companies have organization charts, they should also have what are called process maps to give a picture of how work flows through the company.

1. Need of Reengineer?
2. Historical ‘reality’ for organizations:
   • High level of demand: organizations are ordertakers – Management (and IT!) focus
   • Efficiency and control of operations

3. Modern ‘reality’ since 1990s:

   • Hyper-competiveness
   • Globalization
   • Very demanding customers
   • Management and IT focus: Innovation, responsiveness/speed, quality and service.

4. Ford Motor Company

   • Accounts Payable function
   • 500 people
   • Most work on mistakes between Purchase Orders Receiving Invoices Documents

1. BPR Principles
2. Organize around outcomes, not tasks.
3. Have those who use the output of the process perform the process.
4. Subsume information-processing work into the real work that produces the information.
5. Treat geographically dispersed resources as though they were centralized.
6. Link parallel activities instead of integrating their results.
7. Put decision points where the work is performed and build controls into the process.

8. Capture information once and at the source.

9. Process of BPR:

1. Activity #1: Prepare for Reengineering:
2. “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. Planning and Preparation are vital factors for any activity or event to be successful, and reengineering is no exception. Before attempting reengineering, the question ‘Is BPR necessary?’ should be asked?
3. There should be a significant need for the process to be reengineered.
4. A cross-functional team is established with a game plan for the process of reengineering.
5. Another important factor to be considered is to understand the expectations of your customers and where your existing process falls short of meeting those requirements.

6. Having identified the customer driven objectives, the mission or vision statement is formulated.

7. Activity #2: Map and Analyze As-Is Process

8. Before the reengineering team can proceed to redesign the process, they should understand the existing process.
9. The important aspect of BPR (what makes BPR, BPR) is that the improvement should provide dramatic results.
10. A large manufacturer spent six million dollars over a period of one year in a bid to develop a parts-tracking system and was all set to go online. Only then did he realize that he had totally overlooked a small piece of information – ‘the mode of transmission of information between the scheduling staff and the shop floor was through a phone call.’
11. The main objective of this phase is to identify disconnects (anything that prevents the process from achieving desired results and in particular information transfer between organizations or people) and value adding processes.
12. This is initiated by first creation and documentation of Activity and Process models.

13. Then, the amount of time that each activity takes and the cost that each activity requires in terms of resources is calculated through simulation and activity based costing (ABC).

14. Activity#3: Design To-Be process

15. The objective of this phase is to produce one or more alternatives to the current situation, which satisfy the strategic goals of the enterprise.
16. The first step in this phase is benchmarking. “Benchmarking is the comparing of both the performance of the organization’s processes and the way those processes are conducted with those relevant peer organizations to obtain ideas for improvement”
17. Having identified the potential improvements we perform simulation and ABC to analyze factors like the time and cost involved.

18. The several To-Be models that are finally arrived at are validated. By performing Trade off Analysis the best possible To-Be scenarios are selected for implementation.

19. Activity #4:Implement Reengineered Process:

20. The implementation stage is where reengineering efforts meet the most resistance and hence it is by far the most difficult one.
21. The question that confronts us would be,’ If BPR promises such breath taking results then why wasn’t it adopted much earlier?’
22. requirements for the construction of the To-Be components can be added and the result organized into a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS).
23. The benefit here is that we can now define the causal and time sequential relationships between the activities planned.
24. Using prototyping and simulation techniques, the transition plan is validated and it’s pilot versions are designed and demonstrated.

25. Training programs for the workers are initiated andthe plan is executed in full scale.

26. Activity#5: Improve Process Continuously:

27. A process cannot be reengineered overnight.
28. Very vital part in the success of every reengineering effort lies in improving the reengineered process continuously.
29. Two things have to be monitored –the progress of action and the results.
30. The progress of action is measured by seeing how much more informed the people feel, how much more commitment the management shows and how well the change teams are accepted in the broader perspective ofthe organization.

As for monitoring the results, the monitoring should include such measures as employee attitudes, customer perceptions, supplier responsiveness etc.