What Are Near-Shoring and Friend-Shoring and Why They Matter For Western Multinationals
We All Know What Offshoring Is! But, Do We Know What Near Shoring and Friend Shoring Mean? The term Offshoring is well known for business and management professionals. It denotes the practice of locating manufacturing facilities outside the home country of firms for cost related or efficiency related reasons. Offshoring can also entail the practice […]
The Sino American Trade War: Forced Technology Transfers
For the past few weeks, it seemed like America and China will finally be able to resolve their trade disputes. This is because Donald Trump and Xi Jinping were participating in a conference where a trade deal was supposed to be worked out. The markets were looking forward to some positive news. This was evidenced […]
Master Data Management of an ERP System
ERP packages contain several modules, such as finance, sales and distribution, materials management, manufacturing and production control, human resources, plant maintenance and quality management. Main characteristics of ERP system is that all its modules function in an integrated manner. Due to integrated nature of functioning, a few master tables are referenced frequently all across the […]
How China Destroyed its Electric Vehicle Market
The Chinese government has given a major shock to companies selling electric vehicles in the country. China has announced a sudden rollback of the billions of dollars which were being paid in subsidies to makers of electric companies. This sudden move has left many of these companies high and dry. Many of these companies had […]
Role of Governments in International Businesses
The Need to Encourage Foreign Investment The previous articles have discussed how international businesses need supporting ecosystems and business friendly policies if they are to succeed in emerging markets. Of particular importance is the role of governments in deciding whether they would allow international businesses to setup their operations and encourage them to grow and […]
After the Japanese wave of business process management came the concept of Business Process Re-engineering which rocked the world of BPM. The idea of BPM and the resultant benefits have been mentioned below:
As said earlier, the Japanese companies were able to understand the dimension of time and changing technologies and defeat the American behemoths at their own home turf. One must understand the quantum of small improvements that these companies would have made overtime. Assuming that this continued for five more years, it would be reasonable to conclude that the Japanese process would have become far more superior than that of Ford or General Motors.
This did happen in reality. Companies that were diligently following kaizen and six sigma had reached a level of efficiency which looked out of reach of the competitor organizations. These organizations therefore had to take a quantum leap to ensure that they are on the same page and are competing. Therefore there had to be a method which would help them cover the miles of distance that the Japanese companies had covered in years in an instance. They wanted to do something radical and jump the Grand Canyon of slow and incremental changes. Thus was born the idea of Business Process Re-Engineering.
The BPR philosophy propounded by Hammer and Champy advocated a fundamental rethinking and redesign in the business process. This was implemented when the business found itself in a state when their processes were no longer relevant to the environment that they were in. The methodology was the same. For instance each activity would be looked at for its business value. The whole process will be redesigned from the customer point of view and new technologies will be implemented. However, the changes were so radical that change management programs had to be run to ensure that the workforce is able to keep abreast with the changed methods of execution. It was ideally meant for organizations that for some reason had stayed behind in the continuous improvement race.
Innovative uses of the BPR methodology had also been sought. Instead of taking the quantum leap of technology to cover lost ground, many companies have used BPR methods to take the leap forward, thus creating a methodology which rendered the competitors obsolete.
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *
Continuous Improvement and Business Process Re-Engineering
February 12, 2025
