What is Business Process Reengineering ?

As a completely new approach that enables companies to operate in the 1990s and beyond, business process reengineering (BPR) was first introduced by Hammer (1990) and Davenport and Short (1990). In their articles, the authors outlined a blueprint for BPR and claimed that BPR was producing radical improvements in organizational performance. Since then, BPR has become one of the most popular subjects in business management and information systems, and has aroused exceptional interest of thousands of business managers, information technology experts and researchers world-wide.

The emergence of BPR is essentially dependent on the fast development of information technology and driven by increasingly intensive global competition among firms. During the past years, hundreds of companies all over the world have ventured to reengineer their processes. Among them, many companies have claimed that they have been able to completely change their way of doing business and have achieved quantum levels of improvement. The benefits of BPR (Chan and Peel, 1998) include improved technology/automation, increased efficiency, reduced costs, better defined strategic focus, improved customer service/quality, quicker responses to competition, more compliance with regulations, quicker adaptation to changing market, etc.

Business process is a measured and structured group of activities designed to produce a definite output for a particular customer or market. It is a sequence of rationally linked activities, performed to meet definite organizational goals E.g.- new product development, insurance claim processing, payrolls

Rethinking and redesigning process to add value to the organization.

1) Reengineering is totally reinventing and rebuilding the structure of a process.

2) It is the way for  improvement by looking at each individual process and department in it and making it more efficient.

3) It involves

a. Rewriting the organization’s job description 

b. Making multi-functional skills and team work priority.

c. Reviewing reward system that supports individual performance and internal competitiveness.

d. Designing and testing new information system.

Installing new measures of performance