I think BPR is still a useful tool for business to change. The Reasons in failure when executing BPR are because of the people misunderstanding the concept behind and the resistance from people for BPR. The concepts of BPR are to eliminate handoffs, rework and redundancy, with changing business environment and emerging competition and customer preferences. But as successful companies have proved reengineering the process should be aligned with the requirements to deliver mission and strategies of the company and it requires a good planning and execution with full confidence of the people. IT cannot drive the change; it can only enable the changed process to deliver the desired results.
In order to have a better understanding on the BRP, I have made some minor research on this term.
B stands for Business. It focuses on the whole processes which provide value to the customers. It monitors the hand-off activities that are moved across the organization or functional boundaries. It concerns about the effectiveness of the process and to think about the process by using outside-in perspective from the customers.
P stands for Process, which focus on the tasks and activities that can bring value to the customers. For example if we need to fulfill an order, the first step is to take the order as an input, then need to follow on a sequence of activities, approvals and hand-off, until the goods delivered to the target location. The above example is the sequence of process in the business system.
R stands for Reengineering. It involves the dramatic change and quantum improvements by the use of IT to increase the value of the process. Also it requires the business environment is fit to the BRP. Therefore if we need to change in the BPR, it will impact the whole organization include the business activities and employees.
To conclude, BPR is to improve the current out-dated business processes, by grouping, deleting and adding some new process, so that the new business process should be more effective than before. When we are designing the new business process, we should focus on adding value to the customers. We also need to change the working environment such as to change the organization structure that can fit the new business process. And the most important thing is to redesign the business process from the eye of the customers.
But in reality, many project of BPR was failed because of the following reasons.
1. Misunderstand the concept. As many business managers thought that for any change in the organization as reengineering. Then it will lead to failure to appreciate the promise of reengineering.
2. Some business managers thought that BPR is not a continuous improvement process, and this is a wrong way to develop a BPR project.
3. The strategy of BPR is not match with the business strategy.
4. BPR always take more resources than expected, which involved more people and time. If the business manager set a limit budget for the whole project, it will easily lead to over-budget.
5. Lack of proper direction from the high level manager which lead to high failure rate of BPR.
6. Many business managers focus on the process design and underestimate the importance of people.
In conclusion, I think the failure of executing BPR is because people lost focus of some of the most important elements of reengineering. They forgot to have a vision and strategies around which processes could be redesigned. They had no priorities for processes to be redesigned. They went for reengineering the processes without any thinking of how the process stakeholders would be affected by such a drastic change. And most importantly they ignore the resistance of people like the employees who are not willing to accept the changes as it changes their usual practice on work. However, BPR can reduce costs and cycle time by eliminating unproductive activities and the employees who perform them. So that we can prevent the errors caused by multiple handoffs and accelerates each process in each department. Moreover, BPR can improve the quality of the final products. It is because BPR is customer-oriented so that the final products are the most suitable goods for customers.
References:
1. "Business process reengineering: A tutorial on the concept, evolution, method, technology and application” by Varun Grover and Manoj K.Malhotra 1996 - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272696396001040
- Good research and comment on the BPR
回覆刪除- Should better refer to more recent artcicle , after year 2000, since there have been lots of change in recent years.
===================================
Mark: High Average