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Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) was first introduced to the business world by Frederic Taylor when he published his article "The Principles of Scientific Management" in 1900s. Micheal Hammer and James Champy introduced in their book "Re-engineering the Corporation" which defined re-enigneering as "fundamendal rethinking and radical redesign of business process to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed."

The hallmark of re-engineering has always been a dramatic breakthrough in performance. After few success stories authored by the experts, this concept caught fire in US and few european countries in early 90’s. Everybody tried to improve their performance by doing some change in shortest possible time. But sadly, things did not go the way people expected. Ultimately, the consequences were failures rather than improvements. It took few years for the experts again to re-invent the concept including methodology, framework and pre-requisite to BPR.

The popular perception about BPR is that it is a means of streamlining the business processes. There exists a fundamental difference between streamlining a business process and re-inventing it. Streamlining is an exercise, which results in making incremental changes to the current process to increase performance parameters like quality, etc. In the case of re-inventing a process, the existing one is scrapped and a new one is created from scratch with a fresh look. Concepts and ideas from within and outside the industry should be welcomed.

There were lot of discussions like, where it can be applied? Who can do that? How it has to be done? If you think that there is a answer for all such questions then you are wrong. There is no unique solution. But there are set of priniciples and guidelines within which the respective industry experts have to operate.

Today, companies are facing competition from international players who are equipped with efficient IT driven systems of international standards. Use of technology is not only spreading in the sectors globally but it has also become the pre-requisite for effectiveness and even for survival of any organization. The scope is not limited to business houses alone but includes almost all kinds of organizations which have any products or services to offer, like government, defense, etc. This has led to the emergence of another glamorous tool, ERP, that is being put on center stage by the service providers.

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* Contributed by -
Santhakumar S.,
PGP1 Student,
BIM, Trichy,
Published in KRIYA, February 2006 Issue, the monthly magazine of the institute..