Business process reengineering was introduced in the late 80’s early 90’s and had a very warm welcome approach from businesses across the world including many of the fortune 500 businesses. It was a management approach to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of business processes across all organizations. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_reengineering)
It was interesting how business process reengineering took off and was widely accepted throughout the business world and across many large organizations including the fortune 500 companies. According to Michael Hammer and James Champy the BPR was a way to completely redesign the organizational processes to achieve a major improvement in cost, service, and speed. (http://www.12manage.com/methods_bpr.html) BPR was accepted because of the general perspective that managers got from the idea of improving the business processes by dehumanizing processes in the work place while adding more control for managers and all this justifies the downsizing because it saves time and money. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_reengineering)
When I read this quote by Thomas Davenport who was an early BPR proponent I figured that it made it clear BPR was not being as accepted after the implementation by the majority of the work force.
"When I wrote about "business process redesign" in 1990, I explicitly said that using it for cost reduction alone was not a sensible goal. And consultants Michael Hammer and James Champy, the two names most closely associated with reengineering, have insisted all along that layoffs shouldn't be the point. But the fact is, once out of the bottle, the reengineering genie quickly turned ugly." (Davenport, 1995) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_reengineering)
Today BPR is not widely recognized and has pretty much been abandoned, management has moved on had now accepting the new and improve Business Process Management systems. BPM has being recognized as a intersection between maangement and IT which overall analyzes the operational business processes involving the whole organization including humans. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Process_Management)
1 comment:
I agree with everything you have to say Matthew, however, I don’t feel that BPR has been abandoned per say. I think it has just taken on a new form. With today’s’ global economy all business must find ways to lower costs, and to streamline their company systems in order to stay afloat. Business can use the ideas of BPR to help them do this. By lowering costs, streamlining systems/processes, and adding more value to products and services, companies will be able to maintain their competitive edge. It is this edge that will allow them to gain more market share, and hopefully become a profitable business.
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