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ABSTRACT
This work was conceived during a period of continuous change in the global business environment. Corporations are undergoing massive restructuring. Global competition, sluggish economies and the potential offered by emerging technologies are pushing firms to fundamentally rethink their business processes. A lot of firms prescribed Business Process Reengineering (BPR) as a means to restructure processes in an attempt to achieve the strategic objectives of increased efficiency, reduced costs, improved quality and greater customer satisfaction. Among the technology-oriented consultants and business academics there is a general sense of great opportunity in the air. The opportunity is to apply information technology to the redesign of business processes. The aim of this paper is to show the value of using BPR through Business Process Simulation (BPS). Such a project was developed in British Petroleum (BP) installation in Greece.
Keywords: Business Process Reengineering; Business Process Simulation; Information Technology; Business Process Change; Petrochemical Industry.
1. INTRODUCTION
An approach for radical improvement in materials management of BP' s main installation in Greece through BPR is presented, by analyzing current processes, identifying key issues, deriving paradigm shifts and developing re-engineered processes of "materials planning and procurement" and "warehousing and surplus disposal" using Information Technology (IT). The re-engineered processes for materials management function trigger a number of improvement projects that were identified by the group of executives who took part in the re-engineering effort. Those projects were implemented in an integrated framework with the application of information technology tools.
2. BUSINESS PROCESS CHANGE
Probably one of the most well known approaches is BPR. The concept of BPR was firstly introduced by Hammer (1990) and Davenport (1990). It was later further popularized by Davenport (1993) and Hammer et al (1993) who defined BPR as "the fundamental re-thinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service and speed".
BPR has arguably been the most popular and sweeping change management approach of the past decades. A survey conducted by Deloitte and Touche in 1993 among 534 Chief Information Officers in various industries found that 85% of them had been involved in at least one BPR project (Davenport et al 1993). The same survey five years later shows that BPR still...