Process Re – Engineering

Re engineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of the process. Reengineering is about reinvention, rather than incremental improvement. Reengineering relies on a different school of thought than does continuous improvement. In the extreme, reengineering assumes that the current process is irrelevant-it doesn’t work, it’s broke, forget it. Start over. Such a clean slate perspective enables the designers to focus on a new process.

Michael Hammer and James Champy had suggested seven principles of reengineering to streamline the work process and thereby achieve significant levels of improvement in quality, time management and cost:

• Organize around outcomes, not tasks,
• Identify all the processes in an organization and prioritize them in order of redesign urgency,
• Integrate information processing work into the real work that produces the information,
• Treat geographically dispersed resources as though they were centralized,
• Link parallel activities in the workflow instead of just integrating their results,
• Put the decision point where the work is performed and build control into the process,
• Capture information once and at the source.

Companies can determine which business processes need to be reengineered by working backwards from the customer to determine how best to meet the customer needs. The company needs to believe that in order to survive; it is going to have better and better at delivering quality products to customers.

Introduction of new materials, the advent of new machines and tooling and the improvement of processing and handling methods are more or less continuous phenomenon. These changes can result in improved processing, cost reduction and improvements in productivity. They can pay big dividends if incorporated in ongoing process. Michael Hammer and James Champy in their book “Reengineering the Corporation,” observed this phenomenon.

They promoted the idea that sometimes radical redesign and reorganization of an enterprise was necessary to lower costs and increase quality of service. Organizations must pay attention to all avocets of their operations, including people, products, processes and materials. They should co duct an assessment and planning step that results in an action plan designed to achieve breakthrough performance improvement in cycle time, quality and cost, and customer satisfaction.