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.