Business Process Re-Engineering

This chapter discusses both Business ProcessRe-Engineering and the practices of Six Sigma. Business Process Re-Engineering (BPR) emerged as a formal business practice in America during the 1980s and early 90s although the term was used in the discipline of operations research (Wiener, 1947) as early as the 1940s. In its current incarnation, it is an essentially pragmatic approach that resulted from observation and evaluation of the efforts of several companies to re-invent themselves. It can perhaps be most usefully thought of as a form of business strategy focused on gaining competitive advantage through efficiency improvement and exploitation of information technology, rather than as a theoretically rooted approach to management problem solving. Michael Hammer & James Champy (1993) formalised and crystallised the approach, which is characterised as systemic and capitalises on many established problem solving methodologies and techniques. Six Sigma will be considered in the second part of the chapter and, according to Pande &

Holpp (2002), is ‘not merely a quality initiative; it is a business initiative’. It is about reengineering your business processes or products such that they perform with almost no defects.