مدیریت عملیات و مهندسی مجدد

Business Process Reengineering has been the most influential management movement of the 1990s, and like the quality movement of the 1980s, it has put management attention squarely on processes and operations. At first glance, however, it is hard to see any relationship between the precepts of Business Process Reengineering and traditional Operations Management teaching. The purpose of this article is two-fold. First, it offers some opinion as to what that relationship is by conceptualizing process design in terms of a design-evaluated iteration: reengineering as represented by the most influential book on the topic, Reengineering the Corporation by Hammer and Champy (1993), concentrates almost exclusively on the design step, whereas traditional Operations Management teaching is heavily oriented toward evaluation, taking a design as given. Second, this article identifies and discusses the process design principle of integrated work enunciated by Hammer and Champy. It is demonstrated how the quantitative benefit of integrated work can be estimated using Operations Management tools, and that the benefit depends on flow control, an important additional process design lever that Hammer and Champy do not address. The article concludes with the observation that as corporations turn away from cost cutting to growth generation, Business Process Reengineering is disappearing from the headlines, but process redesign and improvements can be turned toward performance improvement and revenue generation just as effectively as they have been used for efficiency gains in the past.

Business Process Reengineering (BPR), although disappearing from the headlines of the business press, is undoubtedly the most influential development in management thinking in the 1990s. Although BPR seems to have run its course as companies turn from an efficiency focus to a search for new growth, reengineering concepts have been driving organizational change in many leading North American and European companies. The popular conception of BPR was crystallized by Michael Hammer and James Champy in their 1993 best-seller Reengineering the Corporation, the most influential reengineering book, on which this article focuses, and hereafter referred to as H&C.1 Two distinct and separable elements can be identified in H&C. On the one hand, they enunciate principles of business process design. In particular, they advocate a reintegration of industrial work, reversing the trend toward specialization and division of labor that has been with us since the early Industrial Revolution. On the other hand, Hammer and Champy advocate dramatic change, as opposed to an incremental or evolutionary approach, in implementing new process designs and associated organizational structures. Indeed, many managers' primary association with the term `reengineering' is the bold approach to change management advocated by Hammer and Champy.2 Leaving aside the important subject of change management, this article focuses attention on principles of business process design, a central topic in the discipline of Operations Management (OM). A large body of knowledge associated with process design has been developed by practitioners and scholars over the last century. At this time when BPR is subsiding, it is natural to ask which of its precepts are likely to endure, and how they relate to the pre-existing body of knowledge that dominates OM teaching. This is the purpose of the present paper. From the perspective of an OM professional, the reengineering movement has made an important contribution simply by putting in the foreground of top management concern the operations side of business through which work is routinely accomplished, without the wasted effort and firefighting that characterize inefficient operations. By focusing attention on processes as the means of achieving effective operations, reengineering leaders have reinforced a central theme of the 1980s quality movement.3 To be effective, organizations must put creative energy into the design, documentation and maintenance of processes that satisfy customer needs on a routine basis. Workers must understand the overall function of core business processes, and performance must be measured in terms of value delivered to customers. It seems, however, that BPR has illuminated some parts of the OM landscape while leaving other parts in shadow. In their treatment of process design, all of the influential books and articles cited earlier use vague language and lack cause-and-effect reasoning. In addition, their recommendations implicitly depend on a critical element of process design, namely intelligent flow control, but they never acknowledge it as a separate category of design levers. The next section summarizes what Harrison (1997)calls the `processing network paradigm,' a general process model that underlies much of OM teaching and from which one obtains precise language, causal reasoning, and analytical procedures to support process design. Section 3summarizes the main precepts of BPR and explains, using the language of the processing network paradigm, how BPR and OM complement each other, while differing in both emphasis and texture. The last section of the paper demonstrates, in the example of integrated work, the benefit of flow management protocols and the usefulness of OM tools to estimate their value.

This paper has argued that BPR has made an important contribution to OM by elevating processes to the center of management attention, and by focusing on simple process design principles that are easily communicated and implemented in practical situations. However, BPR lacks systematic cause-and-effect reasoning in its design recommendations, and it misses a key design lever, namely flow management protocols, which is implicitly required in order for many BPR principles to work. The OM discipline has developed a set of design principles and process evaluation tools that can be used to elevate the BPR method to higher professional rigor. Unfortunately, BPR has in most of its practical use become a downsizing and cost cutting tool. As companies are beginning to shift their focus from raising efficiency to generating new growth, BPR has now run its course and is disappearing from the list of corporate priorities. But process performance improvements can be targeted toward response time or service level improvements just as well as for efficiency gains. Therefore, there is reason to believe that the lessons from BPR will stay with the OM discipline, and our challenge is to demonstrate to the management community that process design is a powerful weapon to be turned toward service performance and growth generation.