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Archives of Business Research – Vol. 9, No. 3

Publication Date: March, 03, 2021

DOI: 10.14738/abr.93.9840.

Kwadade-Cudjoe, F. (2021). Business Process Re-engineering is always framed to achieve good results when managerial and

human-centred strategies of team-working are present. Discuss whether this is achieved in practice or not, and how? Archives of

Business Research, 9(3). 72-83.

Business Process Re-engineering is always framed to achieve

good results when managerial and human-centred strategies of

team-working are present. Discuss whether this is achieved in

practice or not, and how?

Dr. Francis Kwadade-Cudjoe

FBCS, FIMIS, PhD, MBA, BSc (Hons)

Senior Lecturer, Knutsford University College and Adjunct Lecturer

GIMPA Business School, Accra, Ghana

ABSTRACT

Business Process Re-engineering / Re-design (BPR) was

introduced as the radical redesign of core business processes of

organizations to enable them achieve dramatic improvement in

service, performance, productivity and quality of products /

services. It was touted in the 1990s as the newest business

strategy to make management of businesses effective, after less

was derived from TQM. Unfortunately, the application of the

BPR strategy on businesses, example in the automobile

industry, was only marginal but better than TQM. BPR was

designed to re-organize organizational processes, and then

make extensive use of Information Technology (IT) for running

organizations. However, most of the localized organizations that

adopted the BPR strategy for use, complained bitterly about the

application. This was due to the fact that the managerial and

human-centred strategies of team-working was not effectively

achieved. However, for organizations that go global, it is a

different ball game all together, as there are string of successes

associated with them. Localized organizations should therefore,

create the right enablement for the strategy to work, as some

MNCs have been able to use BPR to achieve competitive

advantage.

Key Words: Human resource, team-work, business process,

Information Technology and re-engineering.

INTRODUCTION

Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) or re-engineering as defined by Hammer (1990) is

the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic

improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance and productivity, such as

cost, quality, service and speed. Currently, Management Tools (2018) describes BPR as the

radical redesign of core business processes to achieve dramatic improvement in service,

productivity, cycle times and quality of products. It is worthy to note that through BPR, the

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Archives of Business Research (ABR) Vol 9, Issue 3, March-2021

processes through which the organization operates would be redesigned to maximize their

value-added content and minimize all other parameters, including cost.

Hammer and Champy (1993), and Johansson, McHugh, Pendlebury, and Wheeler (1993)

recommend that re-engineering is vital for most organizations to achieve the radical

change necessary for the current volatile business environment. This would in turn lead to

enhanced market share for the organization, thereby roping in competitive advantage.

According to Hammer and Champy (1993), there are three (3) driving forces behind re- engineering. These forces have been abridged as the 3Cs, namely:

• customer,

• competition, and

• change.

Grey and Mitev (1995) highlighting on the importance of the 3Cs by Hammer and Champy

(1993), stated that the rapidly changing world makes competition among organizations and

customer demands so intense that only radically redesign (or change) of organizations

could lead to any hope of survival, especially in the context of economic globalization

(Arora, 2016).

Additionally, Johansson et al. (1993) named three (3) supplementary driving forces to BPR.

These are:

• cost,

• technology, and

• shareholders.

According to them, for organizations to keep cost (direct / indirect) manageable, wastage

should be kept minimal, and advanced technology used to re-engineer the core business

processes to enhance its competitive advantage for shareholders to receive adequate /

better return on their investments.

These driving forces for BPR have led to the necessity of re-aligning organizational

structures, thereby leading to new ways of performing work and grouping of the people

who perform these jobs. Furthermore, in order to achieve this radical change necessary for

the current volatile business environment, Hammer and Champy (1993) have developed a

business system diamond, indicating the stages and activities business process re- engineering should go through.

The system diamond favours functional departments, where employees work in process

teams (important element within the BPR structure) to perform an entire process. Team- members are collectively responsible for process results, and deliver products / services to

customers, using their broader range-of-skills. Work is multi-dimensional, and therefore,

eliminates boundaries and barriers, waste, and non-value-addition; in supplement to

empowering all team-members to think, interact, and use their judgment for effective

decision-making (Hammer & Champy, 1993). See Appendix 1.