Paragraphs on Business Process Reengineering!
According to Michael Hammer of the US who coined the term “reengineering”, the definition of reengineering is as follows: Reengineering has been defined as “the fundamental rethinking and radical design of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed”.
The term is also known as “Process reengineering” or “Business process reengineering”.
Reengineering does not strive to revamp an existing process. It involves asking basic questions about business processes: why do we do it? Why is it done this way? Such questioning often uncovers obsolete, erroneous or inappropriate assumptions. Radical redesigning involves tossing out existing procedures and reinventing the process, not just incrementally improving it. The goal is to achieve quantum leaps in performance.
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Reengineering seeks to enhance the celerity of the delivery of a product without compromising its quality by improving the utilisation of materials, labour and equipment. According to Janson, a proponent of reengineering, by focusing on making improvements in all dimensions of the service organisation – human dimension, work process dimension and the technological dimension – reengineering helps companies overcome systematic work barriers that interfere with efforts to achieve higher levels of customer satisfaction.
According to Lawrence, another proponent of reengineering, “reengineering involves redesigning business processes to take advantage of the enormous potential of the computer and information technology”. In order for companies to embrace the concept of reengineering, they must be able to break away from previously followed conventional rules and policies and be open to changes that would make their businesses more productive.
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Hammer states that “Reengineering strives to break away from the old rules about how we organise and conduct business. It involves recognising and rejecting some of them and finding imaginative new ways to accomplish work”.