Content area
Full text
How do you react to the idea of frame breaking? What is the first thing you think of?
Frame breaking, sometimes described as out-of-the-box thinking, is hardly a description of the way accountants think and work.
Frame breaking conveys a notion of disorder and unpredictability that is foreign to our fundamental need to create order and control where there is none. Such methods as double-entry bookkeeping and standard costing were designed by accountants to be applied consistently with predictable results. Our mode of development is to move forward cautiously in incremental steps.
In the world of operations management, however, the words are used freely to convey a drive to discard the old bureaucratic methods of existing North American management processes. The people and companies who use the terms are very serious. The underlying theme is reengineering. Executives from all industries, whether manufacturing, financial, or health services, are attending conferences on reengineering in droves to find out what it is and how to do it.
Process reengineering involves the creation of diagrams of customer, supplier, and functional interfaces known as relationship maps and flowcharting of activities to yield process maps. One method was created by the Rummler-Brache Group of Warren, N.J., which involves two types of process map. The first map, known as the "is" map, depicts process steps as they presently exist. The second type is a "should" map and depicts the process steps as an employee design team believes it should operate after eliminating nonvalue added activities, reducing elapsed time dramatically, and applying new technologies.
A multifunctional team works through the process steps searching for "disconnects" or process steps that appear redundant. An example of a disconnect would be where an engineering department designs and develops new products without obtaining customer specifications first. Under those circumstances, the engineers design something that appeals to themselves but may have limited market appeal. The team also identifies performance measurements from the point of view of output of the total system as well as for each process within the system. Performance is compared to other organizations that use similar processes in a method known as benchmark performance measurement The new performance measurements deal with four dimensions: time, quality, responsiveness, and cost.
Why are reengineering and benchmark performance measurement...