BPR was so widely accepted in the 1990’s because when Hammer and Champy who were popular writers at that time published the book about business reengineering. People agreed with necessity to lower the cost to keep up their business against foreign companies and wanted find overcomes. I think that people also wanted to read their books as they were popular writers and people wanted to try what the book says as everybody else tried. Also, the consultant firms started to use BPR. This fact brought it to the trend as well. Another possible reason I could think of is early 1990’s was the time that information technology (IT) just came out to the market and people had been focus on automation to cut off unnecessary labours. However, the trend didn’t stay long and leave bad name on BPR.
The reason why BPR failed is because readers didn’t understand real meaning of BPR correctly and BRP had a bad reputation from the people got laid off. BPR reconsiders job necessity and causes a huge amount of layoffs consequently. The concept of BPR is non-value adding work which being done does not add any value for customers and the work should be eliminated. The company had excess employees was happy to get rid of them and could save labour cost. I could see that this is a good strategy for the companies to reconsider their processes in order to maximize customer value and survive against the foreign companies, but it is an evil way to employees.
Companies are made by employees. So, employees’ satisfaction is one of the important key facts to bring companies successful. I think that many employers who tried BPR just forgot about this fact and only looked for their own benefit in narrow picture. As a result, 70% of the BPR projects were failed after practiced BPR. Surprisingly some people still using the BPR, however, these people understand the real meaning of BPR by case study. In fact, P&G Corporation has saved $7.3 billion and grows to $5.1 billion in 2004. The summary of the ultimate success of BPR is depends on the people who do it and how well they can motivate and apply their detailed knowledge to the redesign of business processes. But isn’t there any other alternative of BPR?
Business Process Management (BPM) is the one that taking its place as it is evenly driven by a striving for process efficiency supported by information technology. Equivalently to the critique brought forward against BPR, BPM is now accused of focusing on technology and disregarding the people aspects of change. Also, Kaizen philosophy is taking its place slowly. Kaizen is the method which continuously improving with people. This is more focus on employees, which is good news for them. I am glad that I wasn’t in an era when BPR was popular but I am in employee friendly era.
http://searchcio.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid19_gci536451,00.html
1 comment:
I agree that employees carry the company and that when employers implemented BPR they forgot to factor that in. With clean sheet approach there was is also fear of the new redesigned system, and failure to build on knowledge and experience which has been built up over the years.
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