In last lecture, there are few important concepts discussed in class, which are organization adoption by using Leavitt Diamond and the wave of improvement in the business process. Also the lecture distinguished Business Process Reengineering and Total Quality Management, and how it can implement in an organization.
For the Leavitt Diamond, it states the important of balancing IT-enabled organization transformation. There are 4 main components in the Leavitt Diamond – Business Process, Information Technology Use, Organizational Form and Requisite People Skills. If the organization wants to change any one of the component, the other three components must also need to change. For example, we will redesign a new business process, we need to train our staffs again in order to acquire the new knowledge, and also we may need to integrate or add some new IT systems to realize our change. As the new business process may require less people to handle those activities, as most of them are automated by the system. Therefore the organizational structure may be flattening as one manager can in charge more subordinates.
For the concept of Total Quality Management (TQM) and Business Process Reengineering (BPR), it stated that TQM refer to continuous incremental business process improvement with little role of IT, the execution approach is bottom-up, and the output is focusing on the product quality. But for BPR, it refers to radical and quantum change in an organization, the execution approach is top-down. The most important element of BPR which are different from TQM is the length of the project, BPR is a one-shot project. In order to improve the business process of an organization, we need to use both the techniques of TQM and BPR simultaneously. Normally, after each BPR project, we will perform TQM, so that it can further improve the business process created by that BPR project. But as time goes on, we need to do another BPR project again to cater the need of the external environment. And the cycle will continue in an organization.
References:
Materiale til faget Salg og service: http://www.emu.dk/erhverv/merkantil_caseeksamen/tdc/salg_service/faget.html
External Journal: The Xerox Non-Production Procurement BPR Project
This journal is talking about how the company – Xerox do a radical and quantum redesign its non-production procurement business process. Non-production procurement process refer to all the activities for purchasing the all the major equipment or some minor things such as stationary. The company found that the original business processes are quite complex and most of them are duplicated, and it cost a lot to the company. So they decided to have a radical redesign in the business process of that area. The BPR project involves all the teams that were working on the procurement process and they also seek help from the consulting firm to plan the BPR project. During the planning of the new business process, they found that most of the activities are outdated and duplicate with others, so they suggested removing those activities. They also found that they have many contracts with different small vendors, it increase the handling cost of the company. They decided that to purchase the equipment from few main vendors, so it can save much administrative cost. Also they decided to grant credit card for the managers to purchase some emergency equipment, so that it can save the time to complete an application form for approval. Also the credit card company will provide the statements to the company in a regular period. After I studied this journal, I think that if the organization do not change its old business process, it will much increase the resources of the company, and it will lead to difficult to compete with other competitors in the market. So BPR can provide competitive advantage to the company. Even though there is no competitive advantage, at least it will not lead to competitive disadvantage.
References:
The Xerox Non-Production Procurement BPR Project by Paul Harmon, Executive Director, BP Trends, November 2002
- Good reference on the journal on Xerox example
回覆刪除- Correctly reflect the Lect content on Levitte Diamond and TQM
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Mark: Average