Business Process Redesign: A Critique of Process Innovation by Thomas Davenport as a Case Study in the Literature

Abstract

T erms for the activity proliferate-business process redesign, core process redesign, re-engineering, the new industrial engineering and horizontal structures.This diversity is echoed in the variety of descriptions of business process redesign offered by different authors.Davenport and Short (1990, p.12), for example, "define business processes as a set of logically related tasks performed to achieve a defined business outcome".Processes have two "important" characteristics-they have customers and they cross organisational boundaries.For their part, Kaplan and Murdock (1991, p.28) view "a company as being made up of three or four core processes, each of which consists of a related set of interrelated activities, decisions, information, and material flows, which together determine the competitive success of the company".Redesign "captures functional interdependencies and links improvement efforts to a shared set of strategic objectives".Nevertheless, there are some common themes that can be condensed into a generic argument that runs as follows.Competitive success in an industry will depend on three or four drivers of economic performance, so a firm should actively manage the business processes that relate to those core activities.For example, since asset turns are crucial in retailing, inventory management would be a core process for a retailer.Each process will then usually have one or two of three generic objectives-to reduce time, to reduce cost or to increase quality/flexibility.This reflects the growing focus in most industries on meeting the customer's quality, delivery or cost expectations.Most firms have not managed these processes deliberately.Consequently, until a firm undertakes BPR, the processes will be the result of a series of isolated decisions taken in different functional areas of the organisation, with little thought to maximising effectiveness across the whole process.BPR advocates identifying and measuring those processes as a first step towards streamlining them.This involves not only eliminating redundancies, but also reengineering the processes, often so that steps are conducted in parallel rather than sequentially or independently, or even radically altering the entire process.IT can play a key ro ˆle in enabling this latter sort of transformation.As Hammer (1990) urges in the title of his HBR article, "don't automate, obliterate".Since most of these processes run across the existing functional structures within an organisation, references to cross-functional and horizontal flows, and sometimes even silo-busting, 2 are common.Stewardship is then assigned for end-to-end management of the redesigned process._ _____________ 2. In this parlance, functions are seen as vertical hierarchies with impermeable walls between them-or silos, that impede natural flows of work across the organisation.

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