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Re-Engineering & It

Business Process Re-Engineering

The manufacturing industry today is significantly challenged by slow growth and a tough global economy. In order to remain competitive in the global marketplace, manufacturers are adopting radical corporate strategies — like flattening the organization, globalizing production, forming strategic alliances with customers, suppliers and competitors, merging with other companies to form new structures, decentralizing business units, and creating global business units. Having to deal with a whole new set of non-traditional competitors can slow progress of even the sleekest of companies. This has necessitated Business Process Re-Engineering (BPR) for manufacturers of all sizes (Greenberg, 2004).
Background

There a number of definitions of business process re-engineering (BPR). Klein and Manganelli in their book "The Reengineering Handbook" defines it as the "Rapid and radical redesign of strategic, value added business processes-and the systems, policies and organizational structures that support them-to optimize work flows and productivity within an organization (Greenberg, 2004).
. Johansson and McHugh in their book "Business Process Reengineering: Breakpoint Strategies for Market Dominance," defines it as "The means by which an organization can achieve radical change in performance, as measured by cost, cycle time, service and quality, by the application of a variety of tools and techniques that focus on the business as a set of related customer-oriented core business processes rather than a set of organizational functions. Robert Jacobs in his book, "Real Time Strategic Change" defines strategic change (similar in concept to BPR) as an "Informed, participative process resulting in new ways of doing business that position an entire organization for success, now and into the future." (Greenberg, 2004).

Analysis of Business Needs

The first step of any process is to define levels of process and the needs to meet these...