مهندسی مجدد فرآیند کسب و کار و عملکرد سازمانی : اکتشاف مسائل

It has been nearly seven years since the term BPR came into existence. Its innovative approach to change management and resulting successes and its overextension and misuse and the resulting dissatisfaction have raised many questions. This paper provides an empirical validation of some of the suggestions and prescriptions in the BPR ‘critical success factors/pitfall’ literature, through a content analysis of the annual reports of many companies that have reported successful reengineering projects. The results of this analysis suggest that many companies were not implementing BPR alone, but as one of the component of a set of change approaches that include strategic rethinking of business direction and less radical process improvement. This suggests that, at the organizational level, BPR should not be evaluated alone but as a part of a ‘strategic change set’. This paper also presents an exploratory longitudinal analysis of firm performance measures to see the value created by BPR to organizations. The main idea was to see the effect of process change on productivity measures like sales by employees and financial performance measures like revenue growth. The findings from this analysis show that process change seems to be correlated with the productivity measure sales by employees, but its effect on the other financial performance measures is not evident. This suggests the need for organizations to focus more deliberately on the effect of process change on these measures, and integrate BPR with other change approaches and move towards a continuous change paradigm.

Since the late eighties BPR has established itself as one of the mostattractive change management options for coping and adapting to the newcompetitive environment. Reengineering is the fundamental rethinking andradical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements incritical measures of performance such as cost, quality, service, job satisfactionand speed.1 BPR utilizes components of several other tools and concepts such as systems engineering, benchmarking, Activity Based Costing(ABC), scientiÞc management, customer satisfaction measurement andcross functional team building, in addition to Total Quality Management(TQM) of the quality movement. In addition to these borrowed conceptsBPR prescribes looking for dramatic returns through discontinuous change. BPR without the radical change/dramatic returns is businessprocess improvement (BPI).While the di¤erences between the radical (BPR) and incremental(BPI/TQM) approaches are clear in theory, the dividing line between thembecome blurred in practice. For instance, MotorolaÕs famous qualityprogram aims to increase quality tenfold every few years, while manysupposedly reengineering programs are little more than incrementaltinkering.2 Further practitioners see a lot less di¤erence between BPR andTQM, than academicians. In a survey of practitioners and academicians,practitioners saw only two signiÞcant di¤erences between BPR and TQMnamely length of the project and amount of change attempted. In contrast academicians saw ten major di¤erences between BPR and TQM.3 Inaddition to the length and amount of change attempted, academiciansconsidered the importance of starting from a blank slate, role of topmanagement in identifying changes, role of management in project management,pace of results during implementation, employee participation,mpact of the change program on employee morale, need for empowermentand the importance of being able to see when a certain process ordivision needs to be changed as signiÞcant di¤erences between TQM andBPR. Organizations learnt the need to integrate these two approaches toprevent conßict between champions of di¤erent change programs. Somewere able to achieve seamless integration between the two approaches,while others either did not feel such a need or achieved some adhocintegration. This can be inferred from a content analysis of companyannual reports presented in the next section. Integrating BPR with othercontinuous process improvement programs (like TQM) can be done inseveral ways. Continuous improvement can be sequenced after a BPRe¤ort.4 Alternatively organizations could create a portfolio of processesand choose di¤erent process change programs for di¤erent processes, based on the criticality and pay-o¤ potential of each process.4 The nextSection describes a content analysis of the annual reports of many companiesthat have reported successful reengineering projects. The results ofthis analysis suggest that many companies were not implementing BPRalone, but as one of the components of a set of change approaches that included less radical process improvement. This suggests that, at theorganizational level, BPR should not be evaluated alone but as parta Ôstrategic change setÕ.Since the early nineties, BPR has been receiving tremendous attentionfrom practitioners and researchers. A 1994 survey of 400 CIOs by Deloitteand Touche reported that 80% of the responding companies had at leastone BPR project under way, and 81% expect the number of initiativesto increase in the next two years. Many early implementations did nothave a clear idea of what BPR was. Many implementations did not payattention to numerous issues any large scale change project should consider.All the early implementations resulted in a huge list of books, papers and research Þndings, with their lists of critical success factors, barriers,risk factors and intervention strategies for successful BPR implementation.[5Ð11]. Most of them address the need for aligning project goals withcorporate strategy, ensuring the commitment of top management (someonewho has authority over the entire process, and the authority to changeorganizational structure and the measurement and reward systems), need to move away from an exclusive cost cutting focus to a balanced costcuttingÐrevenue-growth focus, good methodological support, need forintegrating with other change approaches, pilot testing and obtainingearly wins, deÞning expectations, appreciation of risk factors, interventions for overcoming organizational resistance and political pressures,interventions for culture change and dealing with the Ôsurvivor syndromeÕof the change recipients. To sum up the lessons learned, BPR is not justanother IT implementation; it is a major change management exercise andshould be treated as such. Most of the failures of BPR projects can be attributed to overextension, methodological ßaws, ignoring people issuesand improper implementation rather than to any ßaw in the concept itself.With the lessons learned in the early years BPR has become a truly testedstrategy for radical change. BPRÕs focus on radically changing strategicallyimportant cross functional processes and organizational structures,captures the essence of numerous change management theories and methodologies.The BPR concept and these mistakes of early implementations underscores the need for a closer industryÐacademics interaction. While manyacademics were producing large number of research papers on evaluatingthe business value of IT and the productivity paradox, none of themstumbled on the now obvious insight that work practices have to be changed to harness the true value of IT. While many IT consultanciesstumbled on the idea as its credited originators concede,12,13 none of themhad the incentive or skills to do the model building and concept synthesisto make it a coherent model for radical change. The BPR concept hadto wait for a practitionerÐacademics collaboration involving CSC index which included an in-house academician (Thomas Davenport) and a fulltime academician (Michael Hammer). Once the concept originated, it sawenormous overselling and overextension by every IT/Quality consultancyin the market. The high popularity and the lack of skilled practitionerspoints out, success and failure in reengineering is like success and failure instrategic planning.14 When a reengineered process design is viewed asa strategic plan, it should be expected that many such plans will not beimplemented as designed. There are other beneÞts to planning that mayaccrue even if the plan is not implemented, that include among other thingslearning, providing motivation for change, and communicating intentions. Before analyzing the e¤ect of BPR, we felt the need to look for evidencethat organizations cannot really separate BPR, BPI and other changeactivities like focusing on core competencies and rethinking strategy.Among the BPR exercises showcased in the early literature are FordÕs procurement process, Mutual BeneÞt LifeÕs credit authorization process.Among these, some companies like Ford have achieved long-term success.Ford, in addition to redesigning its procurement process in the lateeighties, has been continuously reengineering ever since, most notably itsproduct development, and has gone as far as replacing its CIO position with a ÔDirector of ReengineeringÕ position, to better lead its projectedreengineering plans until 1999. Some are still struggling with dwindlingmarket shares and a variety of problems.12 Some like MBL have failedcompletely.12 This suggests that organizations have to go beyond BPRand BPI to other fundamental activities. Di¤erent change approaches, likestrategic investment decisions add value by virtue of being a set of projects,the Ôstrategic project setÕ, rather than individually.15 Since interdependenciesof di¤erent change approaches are complex and indivisible it onlymakes sense to evaluate the Ôstrategic change setÕ together. Before evaluatingprocess change, we wanted to explore the components of the Ôstrategic change setÕ of companies. We also wanted to make sure of what organizationswere hoping to achieve with their Ôstrategic change setÕ. The maincriteria organizations use for measuring successes is cost, cycle time orhead count reduction. Financial measures like growth in revenue arerarely considered. The next Section examines what successful BPR implementers reported in the literature are telling their shareholders in annualreports to gain an idea of what they are really doing, and what they areaiming to achieve.with a thorough theoretical and methodological understanding of theconcept resulted in many bad implementations. Many of the early mistakescould have been avoided if the concept was further reÞned to include concepts from change management and organizational strategy. ThisreÞnement would have only been possible with more academic input.But as mentioned earlier, the BPR concept has been overextended. Thishas resulted in a number of BPR implementation failures, while many havereported dramatic successes. BPR has reached the derision stage of the ÔdiscoveryÐeuphoriaÐoverextensionÐderisionÐabandonmentÕ cycle that manymanagement concepts go through. The magnitude of the euphoria andoverextension has also contributed to the quickness of the onset of thisstage. While some surveys report a high success rate, others have reporteda very high dissatisfaction rate. An early Arthur D. Little survey of 350 executives in 14 industries, showed that nearly 85% of executives whohave reengineered their operations are dissatisÞed with the results of theire¤orts.5 On the other hand, another survey by Mercer Managementreport that 75% of all large North American and European companieshad reengineered at least one key business process, and 80% of them were satisÞed with BPR. Most of these surveys are done by consultancies, asmarketing aids. The objectivity of these surveys is highly questionable.Depending on the wording of the questionnaires, very di¤erent responsescan be obtained. There is signiÞcant anecdotal evidence in the literature tosuggest that many projects with a BPR label are not really BPR projects.The survey results seem to match the marketing direction of the consulting Þrm conducting the survey. What can be inferred from these surveys is theenormous popularity, signiÞcant satisfaction with the concept and signiÞ-cant dissatisfaction with implementation and results. Even if the BPRproject fails to meet initial expectations, the results will provide valuableinput for future BPR reÞnements. Companies like Amoco, American Express, and GTE, have viewed initial failure as a learning experience,tried again with the new understanding and succeeded.5 As one expert

The Þrst section gave a brief introduction to BPR, its role in typicalorganizational change strategies and the lessons learned from early failuresof indiscriminate BPR projects. Next, we provided an empiricalvalidation of some of the suggestions and observations in the BPR Ôcriticalsuccess factors/pitfallÕ literature. This paper explored the components ofthe strategic change set of companies reported as reengineering successstories, through the content analysis of their annual reports. This analysisshowed that few companies were using reengineering as a stand-alonechange strategy to cope with changing environments. Companies that hadsuccessfully reengineered were following most of the prescriptions for successful reengineering in the Ôcritical success factors/pitfallÕ literature,except moving away from cost cutting to revenue building. The nextsection of this paper also described an exploratory longitudinal analysis ofthe Þnancial performance measures of these successfully reengineeredÞrms. This study conÞrmed the positive e¤ect of reengineering on sales by employee, but no such e¤ect on other Þnancial performance measures wasapparent. If the objective of a process-change-centered strategic change setis the long-term competitive performance of the Þrm, then that objective isnot being achieved. To achieve such performance gains companies shoulduse deliberate strategy to guide process change e¤orts to build revenue,and should move away from one-time change approaches to a more continuous approach. There is need for a more comprehensive analysis tocome to more deÞnite conclusions. Such an analysis should try to surveypractitioners directly, as getting data from the literature is not very fruitful.Such a direct survey could also design and use measures of businesschange.