Business Process Re-Engineering
The manufacturing industry today is significantly challenged by slow growth and a tough global economy. In order to remain competitive in the global marketplace, manufacturers are adopting radical corporate strategies - like flattening the organization, globalizing production, forming strategic alliances with customers, suppliers and competitors, merging with other companies to form new structures, decentralizing business units, and creating global business units. Having to deal with a whole new set of non-traditional competitors can slow progress of even the sleekest of companies. This has necessitated Business Process Re-Engineering (BPR) for manufacturers of all sizes (Greenberg, 2004).
Background
There a number of definitions of business process re-engineering (BPR). Klein and Manganelli in their book "The Reengineering Handbook" defines it as the "Rapid and radical redesign of strategic, value added business processes-and the systems, policies and organizational structures that support them-to optimize work flows and productivity within an organization (Greenberg, 2004).
. Johansson and McHugh in their book "Business Process Reengineering: Breakpoint Strategies for Market Dominance," defines it as "The means by which an organization can achieve radical change in performance, as measured by cost, cycle time, service and quality, by the application of a variety of tools and techniques that focus on the business as a set of related customer-oriented core business processes rather than a set of organizational functions. Robert Jacobs in his book, "Real Time Strategic Change" defines strategic change (similar in concept to BPR) as an "Informed, participative process resulting in new ways of doing business that position an entire organization for success, now and into the future." (Greenberg, 2004).
Analysis of Business Needs
The first step of any process is to define levels of process and the needs to meet these different stages of any business re-engineering plan. The reason we need to define and frame the set of goals or needs the business requires is to resolve the problem and not the symptom of any problem. This can easily be the case if in-depth analysis is not followed by asking the following questions broken up in 6 stages. (Greenberg, 2004).
Stage 1
Preparation: What is the level of organizational commitment; what are the expectations; what are the project goals? Who should be on the team? What are the required skill sets? How will results be communicated to the organization?
Stage 2
Identification: What are the major business processes? How do these processes interact with customer and supplier processes?;
Stage 3
Vision: What are the sub-processes, activities and steps that makeup the major business processes; How do resources, information and work flow through each process; Why do we do the things we do now (getting out of the box or mental prison);
The last process is called planning. Planning, formerly called Phase II, is the bridge to change. This can include making a clear plan and creating a menu of options for how to proceed.
In today's competitive marketplace, all firms are seeking ways to improve their overall performance. One such method of improvement, recently adopted by many firms, is benchmarking. Benchmarking is a technique used to evaluate internal business processes. "In this analysis, managers determine the firm's critical processes and outputs, baseline those processes, then compare the performance of each process against a standard outside the industry" (Bounds, Yorks, Adams, & Ranney 1994). To effectively improve a business process to world-class quality, managers must find a firm that is recognized as a global leader, not just the industry standard. Successful benchmarking requires tailor-made solutions, not just blind copying of another organization. Measurement and interpretation of data collected is the key to creating business process solutions.
Business requirements are gathered in this stage. This stage is the main focus of the project managers and stake holders. It is performed by the senior members of the team with inputs from the customer, the sales department, market surveys and domain experts in the industry. This information is then used to plan the main project approach and to conduct product feasibility study in the economical, operational and technical areas. You identify needs of the software. This is the vital stage, because bad investigation may lead to the project
Change can be defined as, “the continuous adoption of business strategies and structures in response to internal pressures
Bjerke, Juel M. "Week 2 Lecture Notes - Achieving Business Process Excellence and Process Re-engineering." MFGO 601 - The Globally Integrated Manufacturing Company. 2 Nov. 2011.
It is a step of defining the goals of the projects and the results are aimed at reaching certain levels of productivity of customer satisfaction. The second stage is measure, and it is the stage of collecting data and facts and evaluating current operational performance. The third stage is analyze with the purpose of developing methods and theories that will best suit the solving of the problem; it is also a stage of detecting cause-and-effect ties of the processes. The fourth stage is improve, it is aimed at generating ideas for reaching the desired process improvement. Finally, there is the control stage that is about monitoring the operations to find out whether the process of improvement is smooth and the problems were solved (Meredith & Shafer,
Hughes, M 2006, 'Strategic change', in M Hughes (ed.), Change management: a critical perspective, Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, London, pp. 52-63.
After the systems planning is complete, the next course of action is the systems analysis phase. This phase includes defining the requirements of the system. This means that the team must conclude what the system needs to do in order to satisfy the users. This is done by forming a requirements...
In the case, Marks & Spencer and Zara, it discusses two business process designs that each company took. You first had Marks & Spencer, who had a more traditional approach. Their chain started of with the buying team, design, developers, merchandisers, technologist, suppliers, logistics, and lastly the store. Zara, however, comes up with a new innovative design. With this new design in effect the delivery of new collections only has a lead-time of 5 days. They were able to cut down this time due to the fact that products where mainly produced on Galicia.
Project managers may decide that major changes to business processes may be required. Change management is important for project managers and business leaders, starting at the project phase and continuing throughout the entire life cycle. Employees need training to understand how the system will change business processes.
Define the current situation - break down problem into component parts, identify major problem areas, develop a target improvement goal
Purchasing process is the process of buying the right material, at the right quantity, at the right moment, at the right price and from the right supplier ( Heinritz et al, 1986). It can also be defined as the way an organisation behaves towards it suppliers, as suppliers are the pillar of strength for all organisations at large. According to We...
The most important value of BPM is transparency over the business. Transparency means obtaining a deep understanding of how the organization works which enables us to manage the complexity of organization effectively [11]. Business process models enables the process practitioners to achieve this by documenting: control flow (i.e., what we need to do and when), artefacts (i.e., what we need to work on either physical or electronic), and resources (i.e., who does the work either humans
The first and most crucial step is to create a solid plan. Plan should include the techniques, tools and data that are going to used in the project. The responsibilities of all the members should be distributed at this step. The utilization of resources and budgeting of the project should be done here. Management tools such as probability and Impact Matrix, FMEA are useful at this point.
The world is constantly changing in many different ways. Whether it is technological or cultural change is present and inevitable. Organizations are not exempt from change. As a matter of fact, organizations have to change with the world and society in order to be successful. Organizations have to constantly incorporate change in order to have a competitive advantage and satisfy their customers. Organizations use change in order to learn and grow. However, change is not something that can happen in an organization overnight. It has to be thought through and planned. The General Model of Planned Change focuses on what processes are used by the organization to implement change. In the General Model of Planned Change, four steps are used in order to complete the process of change. Entering and Contracting, Diagnosing, Planning and Implementing, and Evaluating and Institutionalizing are the four steps used in order to complete the process of change in an organization. The diagnostic process is one of the most important activities in OD(Cummings, 2009, p. 30).