Business Process Reengineering
Reengineering is about beginning again with a clean sheet of paper, rejecting the conventional assumptions of the Taylorist era, or as Hammer and Champy (1993) put it reversing the industrial revolution. This requires what Hammer and Champy (ibid) refer to as discontinuous thinking: the necessity not to be constrained by the current way of working. This concept of discontinuous thinking is central to the concept of business reengineering. In the author's own experience the buzz-phrase when applying an information technology (IT) solution was always "we need to develop an effective process before we can introduce IT". Unfortunately all that was achieved was to automate the "effective" manual system. Reengineering seeks to address this problem and focuses upon improving business processes exploiting the technology now available. Reengineering focuses upon the redesign of business processes and this is a shift in concentration away from organisation structure (as in organisation development) in much the same way as Taylorist efforts switched from "time and motion" (direct operators) to O and M (administration) decades previously. The formulation of BPR has not been presented theoretically by its exponents; its appeal is that it is largely operational and pragmatic (Conti 1994) and it sits well with current business trends of downsizing (or rightsizing in BPR terms) and cost reduction. The aim of BPR is improving productivity, squeezing more output from fewer employees (Conti op.cit.). The cultural implications of the negative effect on commitment and loyalty will represent one of the challenges to BPR; unless they (downsizing firms) find ways to motivate those who have survived .... firms will never achieve the gains that are supposed to justify such wrenching changes (The Economist 1993). The BPR approach advocates rightsizing by determining specific resource levels and simultaneously improving performance. Hammer and Champy (op. cit.) cite Bell Atlantic Telephone who cut the cycle time for filling orders from 15 days to 3 days and reduced the labour costs from £88 million to £6 million.However, Conti and Warner (op.cit.) draw a parallel between the BPR approach and Japanese workplaces where the contradictory combination of workers performing non-discretionary Taylorist tasks and also continuously attempting to make these tasks even more "poka yoke" (foolproof), achieving the latter through the use of improvement teams. The result of this is that whilst the continually improved job comes under the ownership of the operator, the reengineered job is more likely to be imposed from the top-down. Ownership (and therefore the concepts of participation, empowerment, motivation and commitment) is unlikely to exist in the reengineered job. BPR then is clearly not a technique aimed at cultural development, merely for cost reduction via downsizing. The BPR challenge, mentioned earlier, is likely to concern the way the organisational culture is acknowledged; if at all. The following section researches the issues concerning culture and change.