Week 6 - Business Process Reengineering (BPR)

Source / Reference:

1) "Business Process Reengineering BPR"  by Sotiris Zigiaris 2000 
http://www.adi.pt/docs/innoregio_BPR-en.pdf

2) "Business Process Reengineering: Role of Information Technology in the Implementation of BPR" by Nandagopal Ramachandra

http://www.anterron.com/cgi-bin/white_papers/docs/Role_of_IT_in_BPR.pdf

Subject: 

In Lecture 6 - Basics of Business Process Re-engineering II

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Response: 
I'm going to emphasize on the role of  Information Technology in Business Process Reengineering (BPR) and introduce the 3 waves of Business Process Management (BPM) as the lecture notes only mentioned about 2 waves of BPM. 

Information Technology (I.T.) is critical in BPR as it allows businesses to be conducted without the geographic limitation, reduce delivery time and usage of papers. It improves the work performance effectively and efficiently. Disruptive power is one of the major advantage of I.T. in reengineering. It has the power to break the rule, make people think inductively and help a company gains competitive advantage. Amazon.com was one of the company who broke the existing rules by selling books through Internet. It has changed the way book stores make businesses. 

 The roles of I.T. in BPR: 

• Empowering people
• Providing information
• Providing tools
• Providing training
• Eliminating unproductive usage of time
• Eliminating Unnecessary usage of paper
• Eliminating Unnecessary variations in the procedures and systems
• Minimizing the burden of record keeping, data handling and general office work

Waves of Business Process Management (BPM): 

Efficiency and minimized costs were the primary business drivers during 1910s. Technology increasingly became a business driver and increased the speed of change by 1960s. This marked the start of the first wave of process orientation. The second wave of process orientation covered the late 1980s to the early 1990s. Focus shifted to TQM, and then to ISO compliance standards. Technology is shifted from being a process driver to a process enabler during the third wave which began in the mid 1990s and continues in the present as the "coming of age" of process centric business.