Empirically assessing the impact of business process reengineering on manufacturing firms

Abstract

While the BPR (Business Process Reengineering) concept is conceptually appealing, in pratice there are many unsuccessful cases. This study aimed to exhaustively identify and rate: the importance of factors proposed as important for successfully implementing BPR projects in organizations; the extent to which various problems and benefits are being encountered; the extent to which proposed BPR objectives are being included in project plans and are actually being derived; and the impact of BPR projects on specific business processes and on the organization as a whole. Several basic hypotheses regarding the BPR implementation process were tested. Last, based on the results, recommendations are made for managers to focus attention and resources on factors important to success, and to proceed in a fashion which minimizes the risk of failure. In general, organizations are not emphasizing some of the most important activies and tasks recommended in the BPR literature, such as changes to customer/market related business processes, the value-added element of every business activity, and others. On the average, the most commonly encountered problems while implementing BPR seem to be very difficult to address in pratice: making business mistakes under pressure to produce quick results, implementation difficulties due to communication barriers between company sub-units, the unexpected size of the required BPR effort, its disruption to business operations, and others. Based on the findings as a whole, it behooves top managers to engage in BPR projects only as a controlled experiment to strategically reposition the organization.