A Practical Approach for Implementing Business Process Reengineering

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) projects with objectives to drastically
restructure business processes are not successful. Sources of failure are multiple.
An important source of failure is that, BPR focuses on processes and ignores other
important aspects of institutions such as organizational structure, resistance to
change, people, communication, and technology.
Many organizations take the decision to delay and/or abandon BPR projects due to:
- Implementing BPR means being involved in a drastic restructuring of
organization structure and processes.
- A full scale reengineering effort involves substantial cultural change.
-Implementing BPR requires collecting data and measures which are not always
accurately available for many organizations.
In this paper, we discuss a practical approach to implement BPR that takes into
consideration those important institutional factors.
In this approach, we propose to place significant emphasis on workflow
management systems as a major enabler to BPR.
The workflow management systems act as the engine around which BPR is
implemented. Corporate measures could be collected from the actual
implementation of the current processes, then analyzes and changes are
progressively decided based on these actual measures. This will allow a smooth,
flexible and effective change process.