In the rush to dramatically compress product development cycle times, improve market responsiveness, and redefine customer-focused operations and service quality, many companies have turned increasingly to redesigning — “reengineering” — operational business processes. Yet the majority of these efforts focus almost exclusively on redesigning internal operations in areas such as invoicing (Ford), insurance application processing (Mutual Benefit Life), and marketing and distribution (Rank Xerox U.K.).1 Although many business process redesign initiatives start out amid great fanfare and bold projections of state-of-the-art performance improvements, lurking beneath the glare are often quite modest attempts to reduce operational costs in a single functional area, to improve product quality in a single product line, or to downsize the business to reduce the firm’s cost structure. A few initiatives involve total quality programs, cycle time compression, or outsourcing. Yet many, if not most, business process redesign initiatives invariably turn inward. From the perspective of customers, the external supplier network, and key trading partners, the danger is simply that business process redesign may have little or no measurable impact on the firm’s external market performance. Worse, in some cases, internally focused redesigns may actually allocate scarce resources away from company initiatives that could directly affect external customers.
Information technology (IT) has not dramatically affected this picture. In and of itself: IT has been shown to have little or... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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