In the recent past, companies have sought to increase organisational productivity through radical changes by means of Business Process Re-engineering (BRP). BRP is about taking a hard look at why the organisation does the things the way it does.
It involves fundamental rethinking. BRP requires that the firm gets out of its institutionalised or rigid thinking and do rethinking. It includes all those actions that lead to results in terms of customer satisfaction. It brings in the people and tasks to achieve the ultimate organisational objective.
Michael Hanner and James Champy define business process re-engineering as “the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed”.
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One of business process re-engineering’s basic assumptions is that the traditional way of organising departments and processes around specialised tasks is inherently wasteful and unresponsive to the firm’s customers.
In re-engineering a firm’s process, the basic questions are “why do we do what we do?” and “why do we do it the way we do?”
Re-engineering process substitutes several generalists for all the separate task specialists, and letting one generalist do all the tasks for a request, rather than having the process carried out like a relay race.
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1. Several jobs are combined into one, so an assembly-line process is replaced by generalists (or teams) who carry out all the tasks themselves.
2. Workers make more decisions.
3. Re-engineering reduces checks and controls, instead, there’s an emphasis on selecting and training competent generalists.
4. Re-engineered processes tend to take a “case manager” approach to dealing with customers: each customer ends up with a single point of contact when checking on the status of a request.