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After the Japanese wave of business process management came the concept of Business Process Re-engineering which rocked the world of BPM. The idea of BPM and the resultant benefits have been mentioned below:
As said earlier, the Japanese companies were able to understand the dimension of time and changing technologies and defeat the American behemoths at their own home turf. One must understand the quantum of small improvements that these companies would have made overtime. Assuming that this continued for five more years, it would be reasonable to conclude that the Japanese process would have become far more superior than that of Ford or General Motors.
This did happen in reality. Companies that were diligently following kaizen and six sigma had reached a level of efficiency which looked out of reach of the competitor organizations. These organizations therefore had to take a quantum leap to ensure that they are on the same page and are competing. Therefore there had to be a method which would help them cover the miles of distance that the Japanese companies had covered in years in an instance. They wanted to do something radical and jump the Grand Canyon of slow and incremental changes. Thus was born the idea of Business Process Re-Engineering.
The BPR philosophy propounded by Hammer and Champy advocated a fundamental rethinking and redesign in the business process. This was implemented when the business found itself in a state when their processes were no longer relevant to the environment that they were in. The methodology was the same. For instance each activity would be looked at for its business value. The whole process will be redesigned from the customer point of view and new technologies will be implemented. However, the changes were so radical that change management programs had to be run to ensure that the workforce is able to keep abreast with the changed methods of execution. It was ideally meant for organizations that for some reason had stayed behind in the continuous improvement race.
Innovative uses of the BPR methodology had also been sought. Instead of taking the quantum leap of technology to cover lost ground, many companies have used BPR methods to take the leap forward, thus creating a methodology which rendered the competitors obsolete.
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Continuous Improvement and Business Process Re-Engineering
February 12, 2025
