Business process reengineering is very much well and alive!

Citation

Al-Mashari, M. (2001), "Business process reengineering is very much well and alive!", Business Process Management Journal, Vol. 7 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/bpmj.2001.15707eaa.001

Business process reengineering is very much well and alive!

Business process reengineering is very much well and alive!

Shortly after business process reengineering (BPR) was introduced and practiced, some practitioners considered it a management fad that would die like other fads. Coulson-Thomas, however, argued that it was too soon to write off BPR, which he expected to become part of the future business excellence model (QWL, 1995). Dickinson (1997, p. 267) also stated "We must not allow ourselves to lose the real potential of re-engineering by branding false re-engineering efforts as failures of the concept of re-engineering itself". Furthermore, several other researchers (e.g. Watts, 1995; Andreu et al., 1997) predicted a promising future for BPR. For example, part of Davenport's (1994, 1995) vision of BPR's future was that its growth would maintain a significant shift towards changes in business network rather than internal business processes, and that process management would be institutionalised in other management domains like information systems and organisational structure. What really appears to be common across these expected developments is the emphasis on "business process" as the essence of change.

Indeed, we are continuing to see BPR growing in different directions. This issue presents evidence on this fact. Two papers focus on enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems as a technological innovation and advanced application of process management and reengineering; two others study the application of BPR in the context of India and Slovenia; one paper considers the use of enterprise architectures in the management of change; and the final paper presents recent findings of an international survey on BPR maturity and application. In his article, Chen notes that many companies have tossed millions of dollars into ERP application with little to prove for it. He traces the failure in this respect to the inadequate planning prior to installation. His study analyses several critical planning issues including needs assessment and choosing a right ERP system, matching business process with the ERP system, understanding the organisational requirements, and economic and strategic justification. It also identifies new opportunities of ERP implementation and highlights several challenges facing companies today as enterprise systems continue to evolve and expand.

In the second paper, Wood and Caldas contrast complex thinking and reductionism in organisational transformation processes as they apply to the ERP context. The authors argue that for those dealing with organisational change, the ERP phenomenon may sound uncomfortably familiar, as change theorists and practitioners have seen the coming and going of management panaceas for quite some time. The authors present an exploratory survey of 28 implementation experiences and discusses reductionism in the realm of ERP implementations. Their argument is that by applying complex thinking, new avenues might be opened to explain these processes.

In industrial organisations, materials management is considered a major function of the management as it can contribute to a high inventory and inefficient procurement process which in turn have an effect on the profitability. In his paper, Dey argues that in India, problems of this type multiply due to the very dynamic present business environment. He contends that the existing materials planning and procurement process and inventory management systems require rethinking. His study reports on a radical BPR improvement in materials management function of an Indian petroleum refinery. The paper presents an analysis of current processes, identifies key issues involved in the development of the reengineered processes through customer value analysis. A number of improvement projects were triggered by BPR, and these projects were implemented in an integrated framework with the application of the state of art information technology tools.

Renovation is considered a process change approach that can handle change which cannot be addressed through continuous improvement and reengineering methods or organisational restructuring. In his article, Kovacic presents the characteristics of business renovation efforts in Slovenia. The case study is based on a survey questionnaire exploring BPR practices in Slovenian organisations. The author focuses on the use of the business renovation concept, as well as on the necessity for developing an information system that will be able to support renovated processes. It stresses necessity for changes in organisations.

Veasey, in his article, looks at the use of enterprise architectures in the management of change. He discusses the benefits of applying structural, holistic analysis to human enterprises, describing the Axum Framework for Enterprise Architecture developed by the author.

Finally, Al-Mashari, Irani and Zairi note that the lack of an integrated implementation approach to exploiting BPR is seen as one of the important reasons, amongst others, behind BPR failures. They show that the scarcity of suitable models and frameworks that address the implementation issues surrounding BPR remains a relative void in the literature. Their study presents the findings of a survey aimed at collecting data from a sample of organisations in the USA and Europe. The survey evaluates the level of importance placed on the essential elements of integrated BPR implementation. It also identifies the level of maturity of BPR concepts within organisations, and discusses the findings in the context of other studies.

In fact, the application of BPR and other process change management tools will continue to grow and expand, as there is always a need to change, improve and innovate. In the future issues, we will highlight some of the new developments and promising areas of the next generation BPM tools and techniques.

Majed Al-MashariKing Saud University

References

Andreu, R., Ricart, J. and Valor, J. (1997), "Process innovation: changing boxes or revolutionizing organizations?", Knowledge and Process Management, Vol. 4 No. 2, pp. 114-25.Davenport, T. (1994), "The business change and re-engineering interview", Business Change & Re-engineering, Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 2-6.Davenport, T. (1995), "Business process reengineeering: where it's been, where it's going", in Grover, V. and Kettinger, W. (Eds), Business Process Change: Re-engineering Concepts, Methods and Technologies, Idea Group Publishing, London, pp. 1-13.Dickinson, B. (1997), "Knowing that the project clothes have no emperor", Knowledge and Process Management, Vol. 4 No. 4, pp. 261-7.QWL (1994), "Business process re-engineering: help or hindrance", No. 121, Winter, p.9.Watts, J. (1995), "The future for BPR", Business Change & Re-engineering, Vol. 2 No. 3, pp. 2-3.