In the competitive environment, business needs to upgrade itself in order to gain competitive advantage over the other competitors. If the company satisfied with their current situation and did not want to make any change, then their position in the market will be soon replaced by other competitors. Therefore they need to modify their current business process and make it more effective and efficient.
But for the internal staffs in the company, they would not like to have any change in their working environment. As they already familiarize with their current situation, and there are fewer errors from their work. If the company changes the business process, they need to learn the new process again. According to the history of BPR, there are many cases were failed and cost the company a lot to fix the problems. Therefore manager should develop the BPR project more carefully and perform change management when they implement the Business Process Reengineering.
Why BPR Project Fail?
According to the blog from Group Blog (2006), they said that the main reason for BPR Project fail is the team and consultant questions.
The author said that most of the BPR Project was run by teams with representatives across different department on the organization. So he suggested that each department should have representative in the team, also the team should have good balance between people who are the technical expertise and the users who are going to use it. Also he claimed that the team should have less people instead of many people in the team, so there will be less argument when they are going to make a decision.
For the consultant questions, the author said that many internal staffs would not like to have consultants to participate in the BPR Project, as they think that they are the outsider and do not know much about their business. So they may get angry if the top level management supports the views from external consultants rather than the internal staffs who know the actual environment. He suggested that the team should have both the internal staff and the external consultant, so that they can share the expertise and work together to make the project more effective.
So it is important to build the teamwork to a tangible goal and to analysis the current situation. Then we need to examine whole organization and the dynamic of business process that require changing, and we need to make sure there are representative on the team. Finally, the manager needs to access the culture of the company and its impact of the whole project.
Other Factors that Impact Implementation Success
We can observe that human is the important factor that contributes to the success of the BPR Project. And in the previous cases, many internal staffs would not like to have BPR project, as they may have a wrong perception that the new business process will be automate and it will replace their work. So the manager need to tell the story behind the BPR Project.
Top level manager should support the BPR project, so that it will have enough resources to complete the project. As in most cases, many BPR projects will cost over budget. If there is support from high level manager, so they will understand this problem, and the BPR team do not need to worry much about this problem.
After the BPR project implement to the actual environment, the company need to ask the users to do some user acceptance test, so that the manager will know if the real users can work well with the new process. Also, training is also an important step, it is the critical factor lead to success of a BPR project.
Conclusion:
We can see that human factor can lead to success or fail in the BPR project. We can observe that the people in American and Europe, that are more ready to be change in the working environment than the people in Asia. I think that it is due to the difference in culture between different countries. Therefore the manager of an Asian company should provide more training to their staffs in order to change their working attitude, so that they can have a positive feeling towards to BPR Project.
References:
Group Project (2006) ‘Why BPR project fail? There are two points are described in following article.’, [Online], Available: http://whybprprojectsfail.blogspot.com/ [22 May 2006]
