What is BPR (business process reengineering)?

What exactly is BPR? According to the definition of Professor michael hammer, the founder of BPR and Ph.D. of Harvard University in the United States, BPR is "to pursue the fundamentality and thoroughness of business process change, and hope to achieve significant improvement in cost, quality, service and speed". Later, after being supplemented and improved by different scholars, this more radical management concept gradually has rich connotations. At present, the basic connotation of BPR is to take process operation as the core, get rid of the shackles of traditional organizational division of labor, advocate customer orientation, organizational flexibility, employee empowerment and correct use of information technology, and achieve the purpose of quickly adapting to market changes, including business promotion, business optimization and business transformation in different degrees. BPR is the abbreviation of business process reengineering. There are several definitions of BPR, among which the definitions of its founders, michael hammer and James Champi, are widely known: "BPR is a fundamental thinking and thorough reconstruction of enterprise business processes, and its purpose is to make significant improvements in cost, quality, service and speed, so that enterprises can adapt to the modern business environment characterized by customers, competition and changes to the maximum extent." In this definition, "fundamental", "thoroughness" and "importance" are the core that should be paid attention to.

Several classical methods of BPR

For an enterprise, BPR is a major and complicated system engineering, which involves many activities and work in the process of project implementation. In the whole process of process reengineering, the members who participate in enterprise informatization should not only know how to carry out process reengineering and who will carry it out, but also know some methods and tools of process reengineering. If the members who participate in BPR can effectively use modern BPR tools, they can more effectively transform the problem flow in the enterprise and organically coordinate the work at all stages of BPR.

There are many technologies and methods that can be used in BPR. Here are some common techniques.

Brainstorming and Delphi method: Brainstorming and Delphi method are two useful methods to discuss the company's strategic long-term planning and decide the opportunity of enterprise reengineering. When brainstorming is used, participants are encouraged to put forward as bold ideas as possible, and at the same time, it is not allowed to criticize the opinions put forward by others. Brainstorming can help us find out the shortcomings of existing business processes and put forward fundamental transformation ideas. Some software tools can also be used to support this discussion. Participants can put forward their own suggestions and opinions on the discussion topics anonymously at the same time, and store, retrieve, annotate, classify and evaluate them according to keywords. Delphi method is often used to demonstrate the feasibility of enterprise reengineering scheme. The preliminary redesign scheme can be sent to some pre-selected information system experts for their opinions. Then, after sorting out and analyzing the feedback from experts, it will be sent to experts for the second time, so that they can consider the opinions of other experts and think deeply about the differences. In this way, after several rounds of solicitation, we can finally get a more consistent opinion. This is very useful for reducing the risk of BPR and establishing a correct information strategy.

The value chain analysis method can adopt the value chain analysis method proposed by Professor Porter of Harvard University when analyzing the business process and selecting the reformed process. Value chain analysis is a method to distinguish whether a "value activity" can bring competitiveness to enterprises. This theory was first published in Porter's paper on how to combine value chain analysis with information technology, and later developed into an important means of enterprise strategic analysis, which is also of great application value to enterprise information construction. Porter believes that in an enterprise, the activities of enterprises can be divided into two types: main activities and auxiliary activities. The main activities include purchasing logistics, manufacturing, delivery logistics, marketing and after-sales service. And auxiliary activities include top management, personnel service, technology development, logistics supply and other activities. The above activities have different specific forms because of different enterprises or industries, but all enterprises have produced the ultimate customer-oriented value from the links and value accumulation of these activities. Therefore, by decomposing the activities of an enterprise and analyzing the value of activities in each chain, we can find out which activities need to be reformed. For example, related activities can be subdivided into several ranges according to a certain business (for example, product sales can be divided into market management+advertising+sales staff management+...), from which we can find activities that can achieve differentiation and generate cost advantages.

ABC cost method, also known as activity-based costing analysis method, is mainly used to describe existing processes and analyze costs. Activity-based costing analysis is similar to the above-mentioned value chain analysis to some extent, which is to decompose the existing business and find out the basic activities. However, ABC analysis focuses on the cost of each activity, especially the labor and resources consumed in the activity.

Benchmark aiming method Benchmark aiming method can be used to set the goal and prospect of reform and determine the benchmark of process reengineering. Many industries have some successful enterprises, whose practices can be imitated by other enterprises in the industry. Therefore, some specific indicators of these enterprises can also be used as benchmarks for other enterprises. Toyota's return on investment (ROI) was once regarded as the benchmark of Japanese automobile industry. When Nissan found that its return on investment was less than half that of Toyota, they realized the seriousness of the problem. By analyzing their own business processes, they finally decided to close the factory.

Process modeling and simulation: The analysis and suggestions on the existing business processes of enterprises can be made with the help of computer software, which is enterprise information flow modeling. At present, many enterprise information flow modeling methods and corresponding software systems have come out. ARIS (Integrated Information System Architecture) method and tools were put forward by Professor Wilhelm Scheer, director of the Institute of Enterprise Management of Sall University in Germany and president of IDS-Scheer. Its design concept is to put forward an integrated framework, and integrate important concepts describing an enterprise process into the model as much as possible. IDEF0 method is the abbreviation of ICAM definition method, and it is a modeling and analysis method SADT developed by the US Air Force on the basis of ICAM (Integrated Computer Aided Manufacturing) in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

At the beginning of 1990, the IDEF user association cooperated with the American National Institute of Standards and Technology to formulate the IDEF0 standard, which was published as the American information processing standard in 1993. At present, IDEF is a standard recognized by many international organizations. In order to reduce the complexity of the project and make the project progress smoothly, the project implementation team can use modeling and analysis tools based on computer software, such as BPWIN, to model. Using these methods to model enterprise business processes, we can not only describe current business processes, diagnosis processes and design new processes, but also simulate and analyze the costs and benefits of enterprise business processes.

Among the above methods, brainstorming, Delphi method, value chain analysis and competitiveness analysis are all classic management methods and technologies, while ABC cost method, benchmarking method, process modeling and simulation are relatively new methods, especially process modeling and simulation, which provide powerful tools for BPR projects. The combination of the above methods and technologies provides a powerful tool for BPR team, which can be used in the whole business process reengineering.