Study note on business process re-engineering

Study note on business process re-engineering [for the construction of theoretical framework level-1a in the agile literature review approach (ALRA)

Subramanian Muthu, Larry Whitman, and S. Hossein Cheraghi. 1999. " BUSINESS PROCESS REENGINEERING: A CONSOLIDATED METHODOLOGY" Proceedings of The 4th Annual International Conference on Industrial Engineering Theory, Applications and Practice November 17-20, San Antonio, Texas, USA.

Academic idea: Business Process Re-engineering; attribute: concept definition

" What is reengineering?   “Reengineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed[4].” The key words in the preceding definition are the italicized ones. BPR advocates that enterprises go back to the basics and reexamine their very roots. It doesn’t believe in small improvements. Rather it aims at total reinvention. As for results: BPR is clearly not for companies who want a 10% improvement. It is for the ones that need a ten-fold increase. According to Hammer and Champy [4], the last but the most important of the four key words is the word-‘process.’ BPR focuses on processes and not on tasks, jobs or people. It endeavors to redesign the strategic and value added processes that transcend organizational boundaries";

Academic idea: Business Process in BPR; attribute: concept definition

" According to many in the BPR field reengineering should focus on processes and not be limited to thinking about the organizations. After all the organization is only as effective as its processes[4,6] So, what is a process? “A business process is a series of steps designed to produce a product or a service. It includes all the activities that deliver particular results for a given customer(external or internal)[9].” Processes are currently invisible and unnamed because people think about the individual departments more often than the process with which all of them are involved. So companies that are currently used to talking in terms of departments such as marketing and manufacturing must switch to giving names to the processes that they do such that they express the beginning and end states. These names should imply all the work that gets done between the start and finish. For example, order fulfillment can be called order to payment process [4]. Talking about the importance of processes just as companies have organization charts, they should also have what are called process maps to give a picture of how work flows through the company. Process mapping provides tools and a proven methodology for identifying your current As-Is business processes and can be used to provide a To-Be roadmap for reengineering your product and service business enterprise functions. It is the critical link that your reengineering team can apply to better understand and significantly improve your business processes and bottom-line performance[4,6]";

Selma Limam Mansar a,1, Hajo A. Reijers. 2005. " Best practices in business process redesign: validation of a redesign framework" Computers in Industry 56 (2005) 457–471.

Academic idea: Business Process Re-engineering framework; attribute: framework/theory

"We have explored in the literature several frameworks and business process analysis models that were potentially suitable for business process

redesign. In [4] we explain how we have derived an extended framework for implementing BPR best practices. It is derived as a synthesis of the WCA

framework by Alter [3], the MOBILE workflow model by Jablonski and Bussler [5], the CIMOSA enterprise modelling views of Berio and Vernadat [6] and the process description classes of Seidmann and Sundarajan [7]. In our framework, six elements are linked (refer to Fig. 1):

_ the internal or external customers of the business process;

_ the products (or services) generated by the business process;

_ the business process with two views:

a. the operation view: how is a business process implemented? (number of tasks in a job, relative size of tasks, nature of tasks, degree of customisation), and

b. the behaviour view: when is a business process executed? (sequencing of tasks, task consolidation, scheduling of jobs, etc.);

_ the participants in the business process considering a. the organisation structure (elements: roles, users, groups, departments, etc.), and

b. the organisation population (individuals: agents which can have tasks assigned for execution and relationships between them);

_ the information the business process uses or creates;

_ the technology the business process uses, and finally;

_ the external environment other than the customers";

Martti Launonen__*, Pekka Kess. 2002. " Team roles in business process re-engineering" Int. J. Production Economics 77:  205 - 218.

Academic idea: team roles in BPR; attribute: theory

"Much of the writing on BPR concentrates on the need for valiant and visionary leadership, but offers little help on how these changes should be managed [4]. According to Horney and Koonce [5] one reason for the failure of re-engineering efforts is a lack of penetration to  the deepest organisational levels. A sociotechnical approach, giving attention both to the technical and to the human systems, seems likely to develop [6]. Advocates of sociotechnical systems were the first to recommend using the team as a basic unit of organisation";

"Tikkanen and PoK loK nen [11] have evaluated business process re-engineering projects in 21 large Finnish organisations and one finding is that strong personel involvement and training is a basic requirement for the success of a BPR project. On the other hand, there has been lately some critical writings concerning BPR. For example, Stoddard et al. [12] criticise, `what was implemented in the regions differed from the design and was not as radical as planneda. In BPR efforts, ownership and commitment is needed throughout the organisation, particularly during implementation";

"In business process re-engineering, it is assumed that team members are required to have a diverse variety of roles in order to complete their task [28]. When forming the team and selecting the members it must be considered what roles the team needs to complete its task. According to Jauhiainen and Eskola [29] the distribution of tasks required by the objectives and the need for common action influences the formation of the roles. The role is both by its own actions procured and also set by the expectations of others [30]. Problems are created if the team members do not have a clear conception of what their role is or if other persons' expectations deviate from their own concepts [31]";