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BPR

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is an approach used by management to increase efficiency and effectiveness within an organization.
BPR became popular in the early 1990’s when two men by the names of Michael Hammer and James Champy published a book called, Reengineering the Corporation. They expressed in their opinions that an extreme redesign of an organization was essential to decrease costs and increase the quality of the business processes. They also said that Information Technology was the key reason for the change. In the book Hammer and Champy provide a list of what they call “the seven principles for reengineering,” which are the key ways to improve quality, time management, and cut costs considerably. These principles are:
· Organize around outcomes, not tasks.
· Identify all the processes in an organization and prioritize them in order of redesign urgency.
· Integrate information processing work into the real work that produces the information.
· Treat geographically dispersed resources as though they were centralized.
· Link parallel activities in the workflow instead of just integrating the results.
· Put the decision point where the work is performed, and build the control process.
· Capture the information once and at the source.

There are many different guesses why BPR became so popular in the early 1990’s, but the most common idea was the fact that many businesses were spiralling into debt as the United States had to deal with a recession. The recession caused many managers to adopt new ways to cut costs, thus began the Business Process Reengineering. Another reason why BPR was popular in the early 1990’s was many thought that it was being used because it focussed on white-collar processes at a time when white –collar employees was at an all-time high.

The events that took place in the 1990’s that gave BPR a bad name is implementing the BPR system caused a lessening of workloads which caused many organizations to lay-off many employees. Some companies layed-off up to 21% of its employees. Along with this came several more problems closely related to BPR, they include:
Lack of management support for the initiative and thus poor acceptance in the organization.
Exaggerated expectations regarding the potential benefits from a BPR initiative and consequently failure to achieve the expected results.
Underestimation of the resistance to change within the organization.
Implementation of generic so-called best-practice processes that do not fit specific company needs.
Overtrust in technology solutions.
Performing BPR as a one-off project with limited strategy alignment and long-term perspective.
Poor project management.
Due to these concerns or problems related to BPR the use of BPR systems began to decline. However, this is process is still recognized, as it is used as a starting point for business analysis and redesign, and is a main part of the change methodology portfolio, and although it is still used it is being utilized in less radical ways.
Since the declined use of BPR, another process has become quite popular; it is called Business Process Management. Business Process Management strives for process efficiency with the help of information technology. However, this process has also faced a vast majority of critiques because it focuses on the technology aspect and disregarding the human element.
Sources Used:
http://searchcio.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid19_gci536451,00.html

http://books.google.com/books?id=4zWACat367MC&dq=+history+of+business+process+reengineering&pg=PA143&ots=PRPXYzE11P&sig=sDTHWTEufTY389kIHvrqEtDfOZw&prev=http://www.google.com/search%3Fq%3D%2Bhistory%2Bof%2Bbusiness%2Bprocess%2Breengineering%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26rlz%3D1T4ADBS_en___CA212%26start%3D0%26sa%3DN&sa=X&oi=print&ct=result&cd=1&cad=legacy#PPA2,M1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_reengineering