It And Re-Engineering

Introduction
In 1990, Michael Hammer wrote a seminal paper entitled “Reengineering Work:   Don’t Automate, Obliterate,” in which he called for organizations to “stop paving the cow paths.” He urged organizations to examine their cross-functional business processes, refine them, and then automate them.   This simple idea grew into management improvement philosophy, termed as Business Process Reengineering (BPR).
The BPR philosophy was adopted very quickly because of its intuitive simplicity and promise of significant gains.   In 1994, the consulting firm of CSC Index determined that 69% percent of large organizations (revenues in excess of $200 million) in North America and 75% in Europe had at least one reengineering initiative in place.   Others were in the planning phase of BPR.   Similar surveys have been repeated since 1994 with identical results.
The power of BPR lies in its insistence on questioning the existing processes structure within organizations and asking “If we could redesign what we do all over again, how would we do it?”   All process structures are based on a set of organizational assumptions that evolve over time.   These might be simple rules such as “all logistic functions are done inhouse” to more complex belief statements such as “division of labor is good.”
The study of BPR can be undertaken at different levels:
• BPR is a powerful management technique that is characterized by intense and critical scrutiny of current business processes followed by their redesign.   This is discussed in segment 1 of this course.  
• BPR is an improvement methodology that may be applied at multiple levels and may produce either limited change in a process or its complete redesign.   The different foci of BPR projects are discussed in segment 2 of this course.  
• BPR is a documented technique must follow a series of non-optional steps in order to ensure that the resulting process does meet design specifications.   These specific steps are discussed in segment 3...