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Keywords BPR, Continuous improvement, Benchmarking, Performance measurement, Methodology, Case study
Abstract In recent years, three key topics under the big umbrella of business process improvement (BPI) have been continuous process improvement (CPI), business process reengineering (BPR), and business process benchmarking (BPB). Each has received much attention and has been supported by a considerable amount of literature and empirical research and findings from business consultants and academics. Within the manufacturing domain, these three topics have been accepted by many manufacturing process analysts striving to improve productivity and efficiency of companies. However, organization structures in manufacturing enterprises are complex and involve many different processes. Their needs may be quite different. One process may require an incremental improvement in critical areas or technology updating in its existing operation while others may need a total enterprise-wide process revamp. In other words, CPI, BPR, and BPB's usefulness and applicability may not be universal; one or a combination of the two or three may be more appropriate, depending on the process, organization and its environment. An improvement framework which incorporates the characteristics of the three approaches has been developed. This paper describes the methodology, SUPER, and its use in a real case study.
1. Introduction
Today, organizations worldwide have to cope with very keen competition and a dynamic environment as market conditions are changing rapidly while customers are demanding better and better products and services. In response to the increasingly stringent demands and to maintain the competitive advantage, consistently high quality products and services are needed to be designed, produced, promoted and distributed at a competitive cost to capture or secure market share (AQCL, 1997). An organization's business goals and strategies may have to be modified and targeted to raise the four performance standards, namely, conformance to standards, fitness for purpose, process cycle time, and process cost (US Department of Defense, 1994) to match the changing customers' needs and market conditions. In fact, many companies nowadays have come to realize the importance of constantly strengthening and improving themselves to win or survive in the global competitive market. However, such high level of customer orientation which results in fast and reliable delivery of high quality products or product-innovation no longer ensures competitive advantage (Mertins et al., 1996). Researchers like Hiatt...