برنامه های کاربردی جدید مهندسی مجدد فرآیند کسب و کار برای تکنیک های مهندسی تولید

This paper assesses the rise of business process re-engineering (BPR) as a new approach to managing and organising work. Organisations wishing to implement BPR may either choose a set of generic business processes or devise a set of processes specific to their own situation. An approach to developing enterprise specific business processes is then proposed, based on an analogy with the introduction of group technology to manufacturing organisations. The techniques used by production engineers to implement group technology are reviewed and amended for use in a BPR context. A new methodology for information flow analysis is described and a short case study presented where the methodology has been applied. The paper concludes that re-discovering the techniques used by production engineers is a useful starting point for those considering a BPR project.

From Adam Smith’s pin factory to FrederickTaylor’s steel works, the accepted wisdom has beenthat industrial work should be broken down intoits simplest and most basic tasks. Even today, manyestablished enterprises are still organised aroundthe functional departments which first came toprominence as a result of this approach to managingand organising work. In recent years however,a new terminology has become popular and manyorganisations have begun to focus on the performanceof cross-functional, business processes. Sincethe introduction of this terminology in 1990, therehas been an explosion of interest in the subject area,not least because of the radical improvements inperformance which it promises. In order to become more process oriented, organisationsmust first define the cross-cutting businessprocesses which they perform. Researchershave begun to address this problem and broadlyspeaking two schools of thought have begun toemerge. The first offers a set of generic processes,claimed to suit most enterprises; while the seconddefines a set of processes specific to a particularenterprise. These two approaches may be in conflict but there has been little investigation or comparisonof them. The majority of the research conducted todate has focused on the generic processes approach.This paper will present a methodology for definingenterprise-specific business processes. This newmethodology draws on existing techniques developedby production engineers to tackle plantlayout problems. The initial idea for the new methodologycame from a belief that there was ananalogy between the problem of moving from afunctionally oriented to a process oriented approach for business processes and the older productionengineering problem of moving from a layout which arranges machinery by type to onewhich focuses on the products produced.

The business process re-engineering phenomenonhas rapidly grown in popularity since its introduction in 1990. It challenges organisationaltraditions built up over a period of over 100 years,where functional departments have been the mostcommon organisational architecture. The paperhas identified parallels between the organisationalchanges from functions to business processes andthe manufacturing changes involved in introducingcellular manufacturing.In attempting to define the groups of machineryand the families of parts for cellular manufacture,the production engineer can use a number of triedand tested techniques. There is less agreement onthe techniques to be used in an equivalent businessprocess re-engineering project. Two approacheshave begun to emerge, one is to use a set of generic business processes and the other is to define a set ofbusiness process specific to each individual organisation.This paper has presented an approach togenerating company specific business processeswhich is based on Burbidge’s production flow analysismethod. The method identifies a set informationproducts and analyses how they are producedby the existing functional organisational structurebefore moving on to define new organisationalgroupings designed to complete the business processes.The new method, called information flowanalysis has been tested in an industrial case studyand found to work effectively.The new information flow analysis method savesre-engineering teams re-inventing the wheel andmakes use of production engineering skills developedover several decades. It may mean that the growth of interest in business process re-engineeringwill lead to renewed interest in some of the established techniques associated with productionengineering.