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The Politics of BPR
“Don’t automate-obliterate”
Wondirad Seifu, August 9, 2008, The Reporter
Is business process re-engineering (BPR) affordable? Is it a panacea?
The rate of BPR success was terrible. Its proponents were ladled as corporation killers. “Doing business from scratch “is its brutal method that demolished several thousand firms, scraped scores of gigantic operations and traumatized countless employees. Now, BPR has crossed the Mediterranean Sea, at its 15th birth date, to galvanise the ancient and poor land of Ethiopia.
The concept of “process”, indicated in BPR, is not new; at least, it is known since the industrial revolution. After all, process is a natural phenomenon, and, by definition, it is “a set of related activities which transmute inputs to out puts.” Be it a cup of tea, a terrorist plot, or a high yield sheep breed, it is an output of a process. This is not limited to democracy or aristocracy or freedom of speech.
Unlike natural process, a man-made process is immune to change. Unless one intervenes in some way, it sticks to its design features. Even if it could fail to do so, it is governed by the law of diminishing returns.
It was this limitation that caused the concept of “improvement” to survive the industrial world from demise in the 1980s in the name of quality revolution. But, to what extent improvement should be pursed was a conundrum. Nonetheless, in search of a solution, some were rumbling with the concept of breakthrough; others were bickering on how to create a learning organisation, just to name a few. Amid such twist and turns, the idea of re- engineering was popping up in the early 1990s. But many regard it as a mental ligament of disappointed engineers.
In fact the concept had been preached by E. Deming, the original thinker of modern management philosophy, to the Japanese engineers in 1950s. Paradoxically, the invention of the concept is attributed, one way or another to Michael Hammer. Indeed, Hammer successfully popularized BPR through his article, “Re- engineering work, Don’t automate- obliterate” (Harvard Business Review, 1990). Its course of hoop-la was born by a publication “Re-engineering Corporation: A manifesto for Business Revolution,” Hammer and Champy, 1993.
BPR was staunchly embraced by IT sector because it has boosted the sale of their products, ranging from desk, lap- and palm-tops to internet and internet-based technologies. They tout them preaching their supposed ability to demolish cross-functional barriers in an organisation, a syndrome of traditional management.
For example, Ford Motor Company had claimed that BPR helped them to replace its 500 employees for only five in its accounting department. Company B had claimed BPR for demolishing its firm and opting to install a new one from scratch, clean sheet design. However, later on, Ford revealed that it miss-interpreted the result as it was not focused on its “core process”. Likewise, company B regretted totally losing its several year experiences in a single day.
Recognising the problem , Hammer and Champy softly attempt to escape accountability: “ If a company falls 10% short...if its costs went up by 10%...if its quality is 10% low... there is no need of reengineering .” they suggested to seek another means of improvement.
However, BPR did this ostensibly to improve performance. But many admitted that it helped them to escape the surge of economic recession by wiping out their employs. That area was identified as first wave of BPR. Now it is embarking on its second wave, which is said to be attaining a shift from value analysis to wealth creation.
Unfortunately, in its the first wave, BPR, rate of failure was over 70% ( Champy, Hammer et al). Since then BPR has been seen by workers and their unions as “management ghost.” Of course, it has been regarded as an efficient weapon in a politically polarized environment.
Although the controversy over BPR is raging in other parts of the world, it has recently received too much publicity in our country. And it is quite bizarre to note high ranking government officials staunchly advocating such a vogue product, rather than crafting and prescribing growth promoting policies. This does induce a bias and limits organisations’ free choice of a means to their end.
In this country, these days, every success story is attributed to BPR, ranging from profit to good governance, if any. Conversely, a number of displaced and traumatized employees have been echoing their grievances by day.
BPR implementation, however, seems to be reaching its peak without noticing its cost-benefit status and scope, although BPR is tending to be activity oriented and too technical to provide a full-fledged business solution.
The vectors of BPR in the country are emerging and they take various forms. A certain company by the Vice or Vision allegedly runs by endowment fund, and is touting an Asian breed BPR and total quality management(TQM) , along with obsolete and botched quality tools, though, TQM has “mysriously” disappeared from business vernacular.
The actors of BPR are using various rendition techniques. However, it is difficult to describe why a higher learning institutes are teaching BPR, which has a negligible theoretical basis.
Still there is variation in the interpretation and application of BPR. And it seems that the prefix “Re” is only attached to the term “engineering”. In doing so, an opportunity is failing to learn from problems of design. Hence, BPR is blamed to be ignorant for “experience curve”, because it excessively employs its merciless tool and uses a clean sheet to design. It urges 99.9 percent improvement, big leap, light speed service, etc.
That means BPR is focused on output. The irony is that it disregards process focus, and hence paves the way to plunge into a viscous circle of short – term objectives. BPR care only for problems with “symptomatic solutions” that shifts a burden to somewhere for a time being. For instance, though too late, our agricultural experts have come to realize their grave mistakes of focusing on output.
In an extreme case there is a stance that put forward BPR as a “paradigm shift”. A lethal misconception. Nonetheless, like its predecessors, TQM, faded away unnoticeably, there is no safe haven for BPR that guarantees it an everlasting heyday.
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