Control Based Processes
February 12, 2025
In recent months, all of us have heard extensively about the “war on cash”, the move to make India and other countries “cashless economies” and the general trend among policymakers worldwide to move the economies of the world to a digital and information enabled paradigm. In this context, it is worth noting that the emphasis […]
Types of Costs The following are the costs associated with the projects. Direct costs Any costs that are directly attributable to the work on the project. These can include the salaries paid to the resources, the billing rate of the resources and costs of the software and hardware that are used for building the website […]
The analyze phase is one of the most dreaded phases in the Six Sigma methodology. There are common assumptions made that this phase involves a lot of high level statistical analysis. No wonder that most trainings are scheduled before analyze phase. The Six Sigma team members want to refresh their concepts before they actually get […]
While America is the largest economy in the nation, there is a considerable push towards rebuilding America’s infrastructure. Many Americans believe that they are losing out globally to firms that have better infrastructure in place. Companies in China have been beating America at low-cost manufacturing for decades now. However, even if higher labor costs are […]
We All Know What Offshoring Is! But, Do We Know What Near Shoring and Friend Shoring Mean? The term Offshoring is well known for business and management professionals. It denotes the practice of locating manufacturing facilities outside the home country of firms for cost related or efficiency related reasons. Offshoring can also entail the practice […]
Hammer and Champy’s concept of Business Process Re-Engineering depends on harnessing technology to optimize processes as its main driver. To understand why technology is imperative for BPR, let’s first review what BPR does.
“BPR 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.”
Instead of starting with an activity flowchart, corporations are advised to start with a clean slate. They are then told to look into why they perform the tasks the way they do.
A Process Engineer will look at the activities to be performed and how they can be engineered to invest minimum resources and get maximum returns.
To illustrate the point, let us consider the example of Apple iPod. Apple rethought the way music ought to be made available to the consumers. The changes it brought were:
Apple just kept in mind the end need of the consumer and reconsidered whether conventions were required.
Business process re-engineering is required in two cases:
Information Availability: To fundamentally redesign a process, one must know the details involved. Details from internal and external sources must be captured and provided to the relevant people in the required time duration. This helps them to identify the bottlenecks and work around better ways of reaching the desired end.
Information Sharing: A BPR project is usually facilitated by a cross functional team. Most of the times, teams are spread across different geographic locations. Information needs to be successfully shared amongst various people to ensure the reengineering goes as planned and without hiccups.
Technology as the Solution: The new processes that are developed as a result of BPR initiatives deploy the latest technology to achieve the desired end results. Usually it is e-Commerce, automation or another technology driven solution that is implemented.
Business Process Re-engineering has become a very important buzzword in the BPM lexicon. Many corporations who were late in realizing the power and importance of BPM have to undergo re-engineering initiatives to ensure that they are still relevant to the marketplace.
Re-engineering initiatives are however expensive and may require certain downtime. This is the reason they are resented by many corporations.
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