Week12 - Process Redesign(3) and Implementation

Source / Reference:
1)  "The new and old of business process redesign" by Michael J Earl 

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0963868794900035

Subject:
In Lect 12 - The new business process redesign

Response:

BPR was defined in 1990 as the analysis and design of work flows and processes within and between organizations. There are different types of business processes affecting internal or external customers including the core processes, support processes, business network processes and management processes. All these types of business process redesign satisfy the requirements that tradition or status quo be challenged which information technology makes new process designs possible.

The fundamentals of BPR can be portrayed as a star. It is derived from a deconstruction of the phenomenon influenced by the existing literature, field studies of BPR in practice, and the experiences reported by leading edge companies. The model of two triangles representing the new BPR concepts also the old elements which are in practice. 

From the new triangle, 
1. Transformation
The promise of BPR is to redesign to achieve the goal of improving performance. A comprehensive and one-step turnaround is suggested. The planning of transformation through BPR can be found in several forms, in terms of understanding important research questions - BPR strategy linkage, and examining appropriate models of strategic change. That is, BPR lies in the resource or capability conceptualization of strategy.
2. Process
Process is the distinctive element of BPR. It focused on activity and is an organizational unit of analysis. It is a central concept of BPR. It represents a natural way of thinking how business works and forces into sharp relief the poor performance. Now some new processes are emerging which may be more complex construct than it first existed.
3. Information Technology
Different business process redesigns have depended on information technology in various level. Applications of IT may be crucial to redesigned process as it provides us a way to integrating functions, enables both collection and dissemination of data through process. However, sometimes it could be a constraint on BPR as the legacy of architectures built to serve the past which may be limits on process integration.


Conclusion
BPR projects are strategic change projects. Each of the elements of the BPR star suggests where the IT may be or may not be.  Although there is a slightly different between the old business process redesign, BPR is still aimed at same goal, to enhance the performance of the business. The added element are the new concepts of BPR. Some of the practical challenges in the old triangle may complicated by the new elements in the new triangle. Although the new elements of BPR do not make the old challenges easier, some organizations have proved that it is worth picking up the challenge of BPR.

Week11 - Redesign Principles and Tactics(2)

Source / Reference:
1)  "eStrategy for Development - Principles & Tactics - Examples in PR" by A. Albadvi 

http://www.moe.org.ir/_ICT/Documents/Session6-7%20BPR%20Basics.pdf

Subject:
In Lect 11 - The real example of applying redesign principles&Tactics

Response:

From the lecture 11, it focused on the last part of the generic IT-enabled BPR Strategies which is the "minding the process". "Minding the process" means changing knowledge management around the process, including analyze and synthesize, connect, collect & create, also personalize. 

Principle #8: Analyze and Synthesize

Using this principle, it can detect patterns and trends, and transform the data around the processes to facilitate decision making and more vale will be generated along the process. There are three common tactics, they are: "what-if" capabilities, "slice and dice"data capabilities and intelligent integration capabilities.


Examples:
It is usually applied to the business which recommendation needed to be made to the customers after they analyzed and summarized the information, including the banking service and investment service. 

Principle #9: Connect, Collect & Create
This principle refers to capture intelligent and reusable knowledge around the process. That is, to collect with different people and collect information, then integrate them and create new information. The common tactics are :  Define procedures to collect knowledge and create physical/virtual spaces for storing the knowledge.


Examples:
In the internet, there are many website using this principle. For example, the FAQ section in each website which gather the information people always confused with and some solution for technical problems. People can learn from the website by themselves.

Principle#10: Personalize
Using this principle, it can make the process intimate with preferences and the habits of participants. That is, to understand the preferences of customers and employees through profiling. Then, fit the business rules to their patterns and develop the most personalized services to the customers. Through the tactics, a list of personal process execution habits will be recorded.


Examples:
Actually nowadays, there are many company are using personalize principle to facilitate their business including most of the airlines or some online retail shops. They provide rating system for the customer which can show the buying preferences of them (collaborative filtering techniques). After that, the company can make prediction and recommend similar products to the customers.For YouTube, when you click on a specific link or video, in the left hand side of the screen will show a list of video you may interested in it based on previous viewers experiences.

Week13 - Redesign Supply Chain Processes

Source / Reference:
1)  "Supply Chain Redasign" by Fred Hewitt 

http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1527389&show=abstract

Subject:
In Lect 13 - Is supply chain redesign work?

Response:

It is suggested that whether a business process suitable for redesign is judged by their potential impact on relationships with external customers also the potential impact that re-engineering the process might have on business result. To have more detail, we first need to clarify what is a business process and what is the goal of redesign it.

Business Process : It is a set of logically related tasks performed to achieve a defined business outcome.

Process Efficiency : It is defined and measured as the reciprocal of the loss of energy used during the transformation.

Process Effectiveness : It is defined as the frequency with which process outputs conform to their output specifications.

Business Process Management (BPM) : It is to maximize the total process efficiency and effectiveness.

Business Process Redesign (BPR) : It is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness capabilities by redesigning initiatives.

Although there is no universally acceptable template for business process redesign, most of the more advanced attempts to construct enterprise-wide schema including various processes like "order fulfillment", "production and delivery", or "supply chain". And in this paper we will focused on supply chain process.

To begin with, we need to define all measurement and clarify our goal of the redesign job. The goal of BPR in supply chain is to link the market place, distribution network, the manufacturing process and procurement activity in such a way that customers are serviced at higher levels and at lower costs. To measure the effectiveness of the process, it is reflected by the extent to which the process is capable of delivering the right products to customers at the right time. and the efficiency is the reciprocal of total supply chain costs. In this process, it is under activity-based costing. Sometimes based on the total cycle time or the cost. 


No matter in the Intra-Company or the Inter-Company, there are a lot of successful examples of supply chain process redesigning. After the redesign activities, people suggested that the true process redesign is likely to be successful if it is recognized as a multi-dimension, and explicitly addressing the work activity dimension, the information flow dimension and the decision authority dimension. And there are three key dimensions of process redesign identified by the partitioners as being most critical to the success of their BPR efforts.


There are several reasons for why supply chain process enjoying particular interest on BPR. First, there is substantial well documented historical evidence available. Second, this process is generally regarded as primary within overall business enterprise process. A positive effect on supply chain process after redesign can certainly provoke a positive result in the overall business process. 


Although there are a lot of successful cases of BPR, the number of reported failures of BPR is growing. It may due to the inexperience of the manager presented with challenges or wrong application to the process. That is, to avoid failure, it is better for the company or organization hire some expertise or experienced manager to handle the project. And there is no absolute answer, or guarantee for any company to gain success after redesign. After the cost and benefit analysis, the redesign of process, of course,  can bring positive effect to the company, if it is handled well.

Week 7 - BPR Methodologies

Source / Reference:
1)  "Critical review of existing BPR methodologies - The need for a holistic approach" by George Valiris and Michalis Glykas 

      http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?issn=1463-7154&volume=5&issue=1&articleid=843426&show=html&PHPSESSID=kkjbis79t229usnenvcrsv2mp5

Subject:
In Lect 7 - what are the differences between BPR methodologies and their limitations?

Response:

The presentation of BPR is to deal with the frequently occurring problems including the business activities and organizational strategy; and current and desired productivity of organizational resources. To enhance the effectiveness of using BPR methodologies, it should provide a consistent set of techniques and guide-lines which will enable the business process redesigner to reorganize business activities and processes in an organisation.

There are two modes to implement the BPR methodology.

(1) Increment - It classified methodologies for improvement and simplification. That is, to improve the existing

                           processes and eliminate non value added activities, lower the throughput time and best 

                           re-allocation of resources. 

(2) Radical    -  It challenges the existing organizational framework and requests for the introduction of new
                          technology.

Here are some BPR methodologies:

1) Management Accounting Methodologies

It attempts to reorganize business processes and use IT as an enabler in their effort. The philosophy is that BPR can be applied not only to the manufacturing processes but also to business processes. In this context process management is oriented towards minimizing process cycle and costs while maximizing the quality of the end product.

This methodology views the organization from a process perspective as follow.

(1) Flow. The methods for transforming input into output.

(2) Effectiveness. How well customer expectations are met.

(3) Efficiency. How well resources are used to produce an output.
(4) Cycle time. The time taken for the transformation from input to final output.

(5) Economy. The expense of the entire process.

This set of processes is important as it can identify the problem areas within the process and provide the basis for redesigning the process. And this can provide the database needed to make informed decisions about incremental or radical change and see how the impact of the changes is. Lastly, it can served as the basis of improvement targets for evaluating results. The process are continually monitored to find improvement opportunities which is streamlining.

2) IS influenced Methodologies

 In this perspective, IS developers need to understand and possibly reorganize business processes so that it can maximizes the impact from the introduction of IT. There is a need for understanding the wider organizational environment within which the IS going to operate. As there is an evolution of information system, substantial improvements can be made in the development and evolution of systems if the business knowledge is explicitly captured and presented. In IS development methodologies strategic and IS planning could be the first stage of a methodology or could be assumed to have already been carried out.

3) Organizational theory based methodologies

Since the accounting and IS methodologies do not provide models of the organisational setting based on organisation theory and as a consequence fail to understand the relation between organizational actors and business processes. A few of the IS methodologies presented in the previous section have included some organizational theory concepts. This perspective concentrated on the understanding and analysis of the organization like the accountabilities and the roles of individuals that take part in business processes. The organisational theory based methodologies add more elements to business modelling and analysis by addressing the need to focus on people, their accountabilities and their roles.
Actually, there are many different types of organizational theory based methodologies and most of them consist of three essential elements of the enterprise model are agency, activities and resources.  

Comparison between accounting methodologies and IS influenced methodologies

IS methodologies provide richer organisational models by incorporating the two additional perspectives. However, the  problem comes from the fact using IS methodology that different modelling techniques were built in different purposes which is hard to integrate. Also, issues like cost, cycle time reduction, streamlining and continuous improvement are not usually encountered in any IS methodology.


Limitation of existing BPR methodologies
There is a lack of systematic approach that can lead a process redesigner through a series of steps for the achievement of process redesign. Most of the existing methodologies relied on the real life experience of the organization which is subjective but not based on some objective analytical methods, also the specialists. And most of the methodologies paying too little attention to the roles and responsibilities of the employees and fail to recognize the importance of a diagnostic stage at the beginning of the redesign process. In addition, after redesign process,  there is inadequate support for storage and access of gathered information, also no formal underpinning to ensure consistency across models. Lastly. most of the case studies for BPR were done in western countries which cannot provide a persuasive evidence for the organization.


Conclusion 
In the near future, there will be more organization adopt BPR to improve the performance. To popularize this idea, case studies done in eastern countries are needed which can increase the confidence of the organize for using it. Also, as each of the methodology has its advantage and disadvantage, organization may combine approaches to yield the most impressive results. Other than the organization, researcher may work on the methodology that integrated holistic and individualistic view of the organization, which makes organization benefit more through BPR.

Week 6 - Basic of BPR (2)

Source / Reference:
1)  "A survey of current practice and future trends in integrated management" by Mohamed Zairi and David Sinclair 1995

http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?issn=1463-7154&volume=1&issue=1&articleid=843362&show=html

Subject:
In Lect 6 - How BPR facilitates a business in reality?

Response:

From the lecture, we knew that BPR can facilitate the business process of a company in different aspects. However, we can only have a brief idea of what BPR is but not a detail one. From this article, it showed that how the companies in the outside world perceive BPR and how they will use it in the future. 

The goal of BPR is to have radical improvement of processes. Although there are many kinds of tools and techniques used in re-engineering efforts, BPR does not refer to any use of specific tools or techniques. The common tools and techniques are shown as follow:

- Process Visualization: Develop a vision of the process

- Information Technology: Act as a powerful enabler in the redesign of organizational processes

- Change Management: Focused on the human side of re-engineering, such as changing the way to mange human resources

- Benchmarking: It allows visualization and development of processes 

- Industrial Engineering: Industrial engineers are in a unique position to perform the benchmarking operations

- Process and Customer Focus: To redesign processes with regard to improving performance from the customer's perspective

In the article, it suggested that to be success, BPR must be integrated with other aspects of management such as TQM. TQM involves placing the customers as the focal point of operations. The aim is to continuously improve process performance in order to satisfy customer requirements. In order to maximize the benefits from each, there is a need to clarify the relationship between BPR and TQM.

In the survey, all of the companies from different sectors have already experienced both BPR and TQM and they agreed that both BPR and TQM must be driven by strategy since it can clearly define the goal of the processes which helps developing the redesign processes.

The survey claimed that after the implementation of BPR, the actual level of improvement across all factors was less than the level expected. Also, the actual time-scale of re-engineering projects always exceeded the expected time scale. Some people suggested that these may due to inexperience in BPR. Although the improvement is lower than the expectation, the expected benefits in terms of performance improvements greatly exceeded the actual benefits of BPR, which has increased their competitiveness

In addition, it showed that managing directors are the primary initiators of BPR projects. And it suggested that senior management commitment required for successful BPR should be forthcoming.

Other than that, from the lecture, we always focus on the role of IT, however in the reality, IT is not the most important techniques in BPR. From the survey, the most important techniques in BPR were considered to be training employees, the communication of objectives and performance measurement.


And not all the BPR can facilitate the organization, even inhibit the performance. Only two factors, existing information systems and management systems were defined as inhibitors more often than facilitators. But this does not apply to all the cases, since from the survey, organization from different sectors showed different answers.

Although different sectors place differing emphasis on the various tools and techniques of BPR,  we can still conclude some ideas that can apply to all organization in various sectors. To conclude, with more experience, people may gain more from BPR as they may have better planning and expectation of the processes. Also, project must be led with an experienced managing directors as this may affect the level of success of the project. That is, means are deemed suitable on case-by-case basis. BPR can form an integral part of management of any organization when used correctly.

Week 4 - Strategic Alliance Model

Source / Reference:
1)  "Strategic Alignment: Leverage Information Technology for transforming organization" by J C Henderson and N Venkartraman 1993

http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezproxy.lb.polyu.edu.hk/science/article/pii/S0378720605000674

Subject:
In Lect 4 - Which alignment strategy in SAM model is the best? and why? 

Response:

From the article, it shown that not every view of strategic alignment yields positive results and there may still be a problem with trying to create and develop both plans consistently. Especially for the small and medium size firms, the gap between business and IT managers might be very significant.

There are four types of alignments: Process coordination alignment, Process integration alignment, Outcome matching alignment and Outcome moderating alignment.  As mentioned, not every view of strategic alignment can be served as a moderator between IT investment and firm performance. Among those, one of the process alignment factors (coordination) and both outcome alignment factors (matching and moderating) showed a leveraging effect on the relationship between IT investment and firm performance. And most of the evidences seem to indicate that the benefits could override the problems of developing those alignment.

However, there is no any alignment strategy in SAM is the best in all types of business. It's because different alignment strategy will fit on different business situation. To have the best firm performance and IT investment, we need to first understand the business situation of the firm deeply. For example, the firm size, the business goal, the business type, the external environment factors, the way  business performance is calculated  etc. In the article, it shown that different size of business will be benefited from different type of alignment strategy in various degree.

Another important point is to make the alignment strategy supporting the firm goal objectives and activities. That is, to ensure the effective of IT and always conduct re-conceptualize assessment of the performance of IT. 

Although we cannot tell which alignment strategy has the best performance, from the research, we noticed that if there is no alignment strategy in a business, increasing the IT investment will lead to a decrease in the firm performance. This shows how the alignment strategy is important for the firm. No matter which alignment strategy the firm chose, as long as it fits the business model, the firm can gain from it.