Content area
Full text
ABSTRACT
Business Process Reengineering (BPR) has been touted in the literature as dramatic improvements necessary for organization competitiveness, but in practice there are many unsuccessful cases. Thus, there is need for a more systematic and rigorous assessment of the factors deemed important to project success.
That is the main objective of this study which defined success as the benefits the company has derived from the BPR project, according to top managers opinions. A sample of 212 top manufacturing managers (plant managers or above) shared their organizations' experience with their last BPR project implementation. Only BPR projects where the changes have been operational for at least one year were included. Based on the results, recommendations are made for manufacturing managers to focus attention and resources on factors important to BPR project success.
In general, many companies are not performing some of the most important activities and tasks recommended in the BPR literature, such as changes to customer/market related business processes, emphasis on the value-added element of every business activity, and applying the right innovative technology. Based on the findings as a whole, it behooves managers not to engage in BPR before ensuring the presence of the success factors found to be important.
Keywords: Manufacturing process reengineering, Manufacturing success factors, Manufacturing management, Project management
INTRODUCTION
The importance of business innovation to improve products and business processes has been widely recognized (Parker, 2007; Moore, 2007; Prajogo et al., 2007). Some authors have actually proposed manufacturing process reengineering as an integral part of the product development process (Rowlands, 2006; Cooper and Edgett, 2008). While the promises from Business Process Reengineering (BPR) implementation among manufacturing companies have been impressive in many cases (Martin, 2006; Teresko, 2004; Hise, 2007), in practice the encountered failures and problems are also rather numerous (Kumar and Harms, 2004; Launonen and Kess, 2002).
In the past, few organizations reaped the benefits they expected (Cummings, 1993). There have been estimates that approximately one fourth of 300 reengineering projects in North America were not meeting their goals and that for industry at large the figure may be closer to 70 percent (Cafasso, 1993). Specifically, many managers said that the actual project benefits fell short of expectations along the dimensions of customer service, process timeliness, quality, cost reduction,...