Re-engineering strives to break away from the old rules about how we organise and conduct business by recognising and rejecting some of them and then finding imaginative new ways to accomplish work. Re-engineering is a particular way of using our minds, of minding our business. It is a way of radical experimentation of invention and reinvention, constantly checked by the realities of the bottom line.

Re-engineering begins with a strategic imperative, i.e., anticipate-better yet, initiate the currents and cross currents of customer demand, needs and wants; Re-engineering involves invention, creativity and synthesis. It requires the team to go through an iterative learning process for new way of performing work. The objective is not to get the rework done more efficiently but to eliminate it by doing away with the mistake and confusion that necessitate it.

Human Resource

Human resource management (HRM) needs to re-engineer itself to ensure that human assets are enhanced enabling an enterprise to strengthen its competitive edge. Superior performance of an enterprise requires flexibility, innovation and responsiveness with speed, this depends on the enterprise's ability to develop and retain capable and committed manpower. To leverage human capital is the key role of HRM.

Re-engineered HRM must add value by ensuring effective execution of business strategy of an enterprise. The re-engineered HRM must focus on the process of value creation in an enterprise. The re-engineered HRM must develop and manage employee competency. Re-engineered HRM will chart the contours by which the enterprise will drive performance. Empowerment is an unavoidable consequence of reengineered HRM. An enterprise cannot be re-engineered without empowering process workers.

Company Re-engineering

Re-engineering a company means tossing aside old systems and starting over. It involves going back to the beginning and inventing a better way of doing work. Re-engineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality and service.

Re-engineering begins with no assumptions. Companies that undertake Re-engineering must guard against the assumptions that most processes already have embedded in them. Re-engineering determines what a company must do, then how to do it. In Re-engineering, radical redesign means disregarding all existing procedures and inventing new ways of accomplishing work. Re-engineering is about business reinvention and not business improvement or business modification.

Companies that undertake Re-engineering, not only compress process horizontally by having workers and teams perform multiple sequential tasks but vertically as well. Vertical compression means that at the points in a process where workers used to go up the managerial hierarchy for an answer, they now make their own decision. Instead of separating decision making from real work, decision making becomes part of the work.

When employees are performing process work, companies can measure their performance and pay them on the basis of the value they create. That value is measurable because in re-engineered business process team create products that have intrinsic value. Re-engineering demands that employees believe that they work for their customers, not for their bosses. Managers in re-engineered company need strong interpersonal skills. Re-engineering company's business processes ultimately changes everything about the company because people, jobs, managers and values are linked together.

Process Re-engineering

A process consists of activity intended to transform inputs representing customer requirements into outputs that represent solutions from customer's point of view. Process is composed of sub processes referred to as functions. These sub processes of functions can be further decomposed into tasks, which are executed by people or machines.

Process Re-engineering is concerned with improving the efficiency and the effectiveness of can overall process. Process efficiency is concerned with how well the process uses available resources to achieve the desired results.

When a process is re-engineered, jobs evolve from narrow and task oriented to multidimensional. People who once did as they were instructed now make choices and decisions on their own instead. Workers focus more on the customer's needs and less on their boss's. Re-engineering eliminates not just waste but non value adding work as well. Most of checking reconciling, monitoring - the unproductive work that exists because of boundaries within an organisation - is eliminated by Re-engineering, which means that people will spend more time doing real work.

Re-engineering Team

Information technology plays a crucial role in business Re-engineering. Applying information technology to business Re-engineering demands inductive thinking, i.e., the ability to recognise powerful solution and then problems it might solve.

A Leader is a senior executive who authorises and motivates the overall Re-engineering effort. Re-engineering team is a group of individuals dedicated to the Re-engineering of a particular process, who diagnose the existing, process and oversee its redesign and implementation. The Leader's primary role is to act as visionary and motivator. Leader creates and environment conductive to Re-engineering. The actual work of Re-engineering is the job of the Re-engineering team members. These are the people who must produce the ideas and the plans and who are often asked to turn them into realities. The Re-engineering of management asks managers at all levels to get out of their command posts, out of the boxes on the organisation chart, out of where the real world of business lie's - in the market place. The strength of Re-engineering team and the commitment of the process owners, are also factors to be considered in assessing the feasibility of Re-engineering a particular process.

Product Development

Top management leaders, suppliers, product design specialists and resource managers must play active role in product development. It ensures optimum management system to produce desired product with the required level of quality delivered in a predetermined time within preset cost. It is a management system in which system defects are avoided rather than corrected later in the process. It empowers the business, the people of the organisation to examine all considerations of a proposed product during early stages of development, while there is still time to make cost effective changes to the system.

Process Drives Improvement See Table above

Integrated Development

Integrated product development (IPD) is state of the practice Re-engineering approach that applies the best management system practices, principles and techniques to help ensure business survival in global market place. Re-engineering concentrates on examining existing system to improve business by replacing or improving process. The IPD approach defines the product characteristics while defining the process by which the product will be manufactured.

Integrated product development is fundamentally new way of looking at how products are brought from conception to market. Technology is important to efficiently design and analyse complex systems. IPD integrates the independent phases of the product development life cycle, product design and manufacturing process towards ensuring efficiency of the overall process.

IPD is characterised by focus on customer requirements, a conviction that quality is the result of improving the product and process and philosophy that improvement of all the process of design, production and support are never ending responsibilities of the entire enterprise.

Many improvements and cost savings that result from IPD are due to the application of multifunctional process examination teams and he use of quality improvement technologies. IPD is people and process focussed. It demands high degree of teamwork.

In order to obtain full benefits of IPD, each organisation should re-examine its business, design, manufacturing and support process. Three key benefits indicators of the success of IPD are quality improvement cost reduction and cycle time improvement. Many companies approach Re-engineering of business based on success in implementing continuous process improvement.

Conclusion

Re-engineering is not about making marginal or incremental improvements but about achieving quantum leap in performance, Marginal improvement requires fine-tuning, i.e., dramatic improvement demands following up the old and replacing it with something new. In Re-engineering we uncover and restore the original, clean process, then create other process for other situations. That means we end up with two or more processes. Re-engineering is about beginning again with a clean sheet of paper. It is about rejecting the conventional wisdom and received assumptions of the past. Re-engineering is about inventing new approaches to process structure that bear little to those of previous eras. Re-engineering is the search for new models of organising work.

References

Process Re-engineering By L Roberts
Re-engineering management by G Champy
Re-engineering the corporation By M Hammer and G Champy
Re-engineering by V D Hunt