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.