The concepts behind business process reengineering (BPR) have become an important management tool and are likely here to stay. There have been a variety of BPR implementation approaches developed, but many of them lack the specifies required for an actual BPR implementation.
This paper illustrates how borrowing from the approaches developed for production system design, specifically, binary ordering for machine cell formation for forming business process teams, can open up a whole area of existing tools that can assist in BPR implementation. Simple, yet powerful, the resulting methodology can increase the efficacy of BPR efforts.
Some have stated that business process reengineering(BPR) is just a buzz word that will have
only a short life like many other so-called managerial“fads”. Hansen (Foster, 1994) states that BPR isa misnomer. He concludes that reengineering doesnot exist because business systems were never engineeredin the first place, they simplydeveloped.However,manyargue(Berrington and Oblich,1995; Kirsch, 1994; Hales and Savoie, 1994) thatBPR is a fascinating concept that has the potentialto save a failing company or give an averagecompany that extra boost to leave its competitorsin the dust. A variety of definitions of BPR havebeen proposed (Klein, 1993; Davenport and Short,1990; Manganelli and Klein, 1994a; Ovans, 1995)but perhaps the most popular came from MichaelHammer and James ChampyintheirseminalbookReengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto forBusiness Revolution. Hammer and Champy (1993,
p. 32) state that “Reengineering, properly defined, isthe fundamental rethinking and radical redesign ofbusiness processes to achieve dramatic improvementsin critical, contempory measures of performancesuch as cost, quality, service and speed”.There is agreement in the literature that BPRincorporates the concept of viewing a corporationfrom a cross-department perspective. Viewing thebusiness from a business processes rather than adepartmental point of view highlights value-addedactivities and underscores where there is the mostopportunity for improvement. Kim (1994) believesthat one of the most important aspects of BPR is
the decomposition of the business by cross-functionalAccording to Lester (1994) a business
process includes activities that have inputs,add value and results in value for customers.
However, even with agreement on the definitionof BPR and the critical aspect of BPR, there has notdeveloped a set of implementation tools to supportthe adoption of BPR. Rather, a set of general implementationsteps or recipes have been proposed. Lee1995a) suggests that there are six steps in theimplementation of BPR: (1) organize the BPR teamand prepare in the initial BPR plan; (2) build acustomer-focused model of critical core processes;(3) select a critical core process to reengineer;(4) identify additional value-added processes andactivities related to the critical core process; (5)activities related to the critical core process; (5)benchmark performance and performance drivers;and (6) create vision by designing and implementing
the BPR. Yet, no specific tools are proposed tosupport these six steps. This paper shows how toolsdeveloped for the design of production systems canbe used to support the second of the six steps (builda customer-oriented model of the organization’scritical core processes) in order to form processteams. The process teams are developed using thecellular manufacturing technique of binary ordering.The result of this cross-functional redesign willbe improved service because certain business processeswill be able to be completed without everleaving a process team “cell”, thus reducing the leadtime of that process. Gary Cokins states that BPRis the radical redesigning of processes to speedthe flow of materials, information, and decisions
(Cokins, 1994). This paper will explain how thecreation of these process teams increases the speedof flow of materials, information, and decisions.
A variety of BPR implementation approacheshas been developed (Lee, 1995b) but many
are not easy to use or understand and lack implementationspecifics. The application of techniquesfrom production system design opens up a wholehost of proven tools for the implementationof BPR. Specifically, cellular manufacturingtechniques can be used for forming businessprocess teams. There are enough reasons for BPRto fail without the added complication of a lack ofspecific implementation tools. When Manganelliand Klein (1994b) discuss reengineering tools theyemphasize the importance of the methods beingusable by business people, not just technicians.The use of cellular manufacturing techniques to
form process teams provides a simple, yet powerfulapproach.The parallels between the production system andbusiness environments are many. Through the developmentof business process cells the business canbe analyzed from a business process point of view
and process teams can be generated to performtasks that once travelled between many departmentsbefore completion. Through thecreation of process teams, these tasks can be
accomplished without ever leaving the processteam. The results of creating process teams includeadvantages such as increased worker flexibilityto perform a greater variety of tasks, more streamlinedprocess flows, less business process “WIP”,and the reduction in overall time for completion ofa business process.
