Bpr and Tqm

Business Process Reengineering

and

Total Quality Management

INTRODUCTION

Recent business approaches and techniques have generally aimed at improving performance, increasing profits, gaining market share, and most importantly satisfying the customer who has become more educated and more demanding than ever. Businesses have realized that there is a need to restructure their business practices and become more customer-focused.

In the past two decades, the two most prominent management approaches, Business Process Reengineering (BPR) and Total Quality Management (TQM) have dominated the business world for a period of time.

CHAPTER I

Business Process Reengineering (BPR)

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) Defined

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is a management approach aiming at improvements by means of elevating efficiency and effectiveness of the processes that exist within and across organizations. The key to BPR is for organizations to look at their business processes from a “clean slate” perspective and determine how they can best construct these processes to improve how they conduct business.[i]

According to its originators, Hammer and Champy (as cited in the businessprocessreengineering.org), reengineering refers to "the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service and speed."

BPR can be better understood by analyzing the terms of its original definition (Hetzel, 2011). Fundamental rethinking is the reconsideration of the basic questions of "why do they (organizations) do what they do? And why do they do it the way they do?" Radical redesign means uprooting the old and creating new structures and processes. As such reengineering is about reinventing the business and not improving or modifying it. Dramatic refers to the achievement of quantum leaps rather than incremental improvements in...