Summary: Improvement Approaches

Read the summary and the most important questions on improvement approaches

• 1 BPR

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• What is the goal of BPR?

  - dramatic improvement in critical, contemporary measures of performance (e.g. costs, quality, service and speed (Hammer and Champy 1993)
  - attain major business goals (Alter 1990)
  - achieve dramatic improvements in organizational performance (lowenthal 1994)

• How does the BPR approach work? Where is emphasis on?

  focus on customer requirement
  Operation organized around process
    emphasis: on output

• What is the history of BPR?

  - developed mid 80s 
  - early adopters: IBM, Xerox, Cigna
  - economic presures: forced managers to make radical changes
  - other pressures: increased competition and introduction of new (IC) technologies

• What are the objectives/opportunities of BPR?

  - (dramatically) reduce costs
  - reduce lead times
  - (dramatically) improve customer services/employee quality of life
  - Reinvent basic rules of the business
  - Increase customer satisfaction
  - Increase organizational learning

• What to change with BPR?

  • Value adding (for customer) business processes
  • Strategic and value adding processes (Hammer & Champy 1993)
  • key behavior levels of organization: jobs, skills, structure, shared values, measurement system and information technology

• What are external change conditions for BPR?

  - often pays attention or is initiated by : economic and technical factyors
  - 3 major forces which initiate BPR projects (hammer and champy 1993)
  1. customer expectation
  2. high level of competition
  3. persistent change and pre-requisite in some markets

• What are internal environmental change conditions for BPR?

  - scope: very large
  - readiness for change: not much attention is payed to this aspect
  - capabilties: top management: top-down leadership style; have to anticipate and cope with resistance
  - power: not key focus since power lies with top management  
  - Capacity: requires high capacity in terms of finances and time
  - preservation: BPR pays no attention to what needs to be preserved in organization

• What are risks of BPR?

  - political coalition can form and derail change
  - lack of sufficient control to enforce change
  - lack of employee involvement leading to loss of talented people
  - technical incompetence
  - project unpreparedness
  - implementation is costly
  - Project is time-consuming
  - only 1 project an 1 process re-engineered at a time
  - 50-70% failure rate

• Who initiates the BPR change?

  top management (=change leader)

• Who implements BPR change?

  lower level managers and workers