Why do many Managers fail at BPR?
Business process reengineering (BPR) is also known as Business Process Redesign, Business Transformation or Business Process Change Management. As the name suggests, BPR look at organization’s business processes from a clean state and then tries to determine the best methods to improve ways to conduct business.
Since BPR looks at ways to improve business and reducing costs; it is commonly mistaken for major workforce reductions. It strictly focuses on efficiency and technology and completely disregards well being of the people in the organization. For most companies, payroll is the biggest expense. Therefore, if someone wants to reduce cost they think of reducing the workforce. In my opinion this happens because its human nature to not like changes. And when senior management has to make some type of change they don’t think of changing their ways of doing business; they are reluctant to do so. They think of not fixing something that is not broken because for them it’s the people that are the liability and not the current process of the organization. They are stuck in their paradigms. This leads to the failure of BPR.
One of the main reasons for BPR’s breakdown is that it fails to successfully manage the change of people. In my opinion, BPR should not be used explicitly for reducing cost, it should be used to look at current methods of an organization and how can those methods be changed so that the organizations can perform at their maximum capacity to produce maximum profits.
BPR mostly is used by companies that are desperate to cut costs to return to profitability. When companies reach this stage, it is generally already late. That is when managers push the panic button in hope that using BPR will save the company from losing any more money. Lack of management commitment is another reason why managers fail at BPR. Managers are too focused on cutting costs and they fail to see the big picture. Managers try to juggle multiple, uncoordinated tasks and use inadequate methodology tools.
1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_reengineering
1 comment:
It is really interesting topic and you describe it very well. I agree with you that most of the people have misunderstanding about BPR. They just think it as a tool for reducing cost but they don’t know how BPR is used to achieve this goal. Also, some time management uses it to achieve some of their hidden objectives. It is true that BPR helps in reducing cost but only through improving processes. Though BPR you can analyze your existing processes and can eliminate those that are not contributing any value. In this way you can reduce the cost that was used on unproductive activities. But as you said people use it in a wrong way and focus on other areas like lay offs etc.
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