W6 - Business Process Reengineering (BPR)

Source / Reference:

1) "The Xerox Non-Production Procurement BPR Project"  by Paul Harmon 2002 
http://www.bptrends.com/publicationfiles/BPT%20Case%20Study-Xerox%20Procurement%2011-02.pdf

Subject: 

In Lecture 6 - Basics of Business Process Re-engineering (2)

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Response: 

In lecture 6, there are three major parts, including design mindset and organization adaptation, BPR evolution and life cycle of business process improvement.

First, let me review what design mindset is. Design mindset has clear concept of business strategy, it includes business strategy, business processes which achieves business strategy and IT which is highly implemented by BPR. Business Strategy contains Business Processes which means a top down approach is used by the company and the top management will responsible for designing Business Strategy so as to support the redesign in Business Process. On the other hand, Business Processes contains IT, which means the use of new technology can help improve as an enabler to facilitate the redesign in Business Processes.

                                                  

Next, I am going to explain the organization adaptation. The Leavitt Diamond which consisted of Business Process, Information Technology Use, Organizational Form and Requisite People Skills is the main concept of the organization. The concept of The Leavitt Diamond is four variables will co-ordinate with each others. If there is anyone variables changed, the other variables need to be adjusted accordingly. It can help to balance the IT-enabled organizational transformation.

Then, I am going to talk about the BPR evolution. Total Quality Management (TQM) is to improve the quality continually which is the BPR evolution. It is composed of three paradigms, total, quality and management. When collecting enough improvement, it is time for BPR to change. In the following, there is a table interpreting the difference between BPR and TQM.

	BPR	TQM
Size of change	Revolution	Evolution
Magnitude of targeted improvement	Quantum	Incremental
Execution approach	Top down	Bottom up
Type	One-shot project	Continuous improvement
Based	IT based	Non-IT based

 Then, I will talk about the Life Cycle of Business Process Improvement.

In this diagram, we can see there is an integration of BPR and TQM which is the way of modern business process redesign. As it is impossible for a company only take BPR once only and without any follow up action like TQM for ensuring its quality impact in the future. Also, if a company only take TQM for redesigning the business process, it is also impossible to see there is a radical change on their performance improvement.

After talking about lecture content, I have do research about the whole process of how BPR is implemented step-by-step and how BPR transforms the current process (AS-IS) to an improved process (TO-BE). Then, I have found an article about BPR on non-production procurement conducted by Xerox Corporation in 1994. After redesigning the business process, a very significant portion of the money formerly spent on administrating purchasing had been saved, hundreds of activities had been reduced to dozens, numerous redundant sub-processes were now combined into three major sub-processes, and hundreds of suppliers had been reduced to four major suppliers and so on. The Xerox NPP process improvement effort is a great example of successful BPR. In this case, the company didn’t completely reinvent the process, but they simplified it and improved it a many different ways.