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25th September 2011
BPR-It’s meaning for underperforming Organizations According to Davenport (1990) a business process may be defined as a set of logically related tasks whose performance leads to a desired outcome. Re-engineering of these business processes means the analysis and re-design of workflow within and between enterprises. A cycle of BPR can be identified as under – (Radhakrishnan) * Identify the present processes and the outcomes of these processes * Analyze the process, review them and find out the points where business processes are lacking. * Make a new design to re-align the business processes along the lines of best practices within the industry or even outside the industry. * Implement the new business processes and test them.
Once the BPR is done, we again analyze the processes which are being followed currently thus making BPR a continuous improvement process. When an underperforming organization embarks on a mission to re-engineer its business processes it can mean the turnaround of the firm or its complete collapse. As the firm is already underperforming so finding benchmarks will not be much difficult .However the difficulty with such a firm will be employee motivation and resource crunch. These are the key issues to be dealt with when doing BPR for an underperforming firm. IT is one of the means through which BPR can be achieved ; it is not an end itself. (Guy Doumeingts) The ERP package is there to help the BPR process. Many firms equate BPR with the implementation of the ERP software. This is where IT becomes a hurdle rather than a support for BPR. The software should be molded to suit the business processes. The processes and their outcomes are the important thing which needs to be re-organized by the firm; the software is not the important thing. When the latter assumes more