SEMESTER SEPTEMBER 2014 – JANUARY 2015 
1 | P a g e 
INTRODUCTION 
The concept of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is to rethink and breakdown 
existing business process. This allows a company to reduce cost and improve productivity 
through newer, more efficient process. It is important to remember however, though there are 
instances where these is necessary, BPR is not without its disadvantage. This makes it vital to 
weight your decision carefully. One of the most obvious adverse effects of a company’s 
decision to reengineer is lowered employee morale. Most people are vary of changes and do 
not manage to adapt to it easily. These aspect need to keep in mind when trying to make 
decision to go through with the activity.
SEMESTER SEPTEMBER 2014 – JANUARY 2015 
DEFINITION BUSINESS REENGINEERING PROCESS (BPR) 
2 | P a g e 
AND CONTINUOUS PROCESS IMPROVEMENT (CPI) 
According to Hammer and Champy, BPR is the fundamental rethink and radical 
redesign of business process to achieve dramatic improvement in performance such as cost, 
quality, service, speed etc. 
In BPR the organization need to go back to the basic and re-examine their roots. It 
doesn’t believe in small improvement rather it aims at total reinvention. BPR focus more on 
process and not on task, job or people. For example, we do not redesign personnel but we 
redesign the hiring process. 
The entire technological human and organization unit maybe change in BPR. It is 
important to us to understand that a significant business process can involve multiple 
organizational units. When we doing BPR it not only affects the process but also affect the 
people completing the process, the skill factor required and the organizational procedure for 
managing those people. In BPR when we change the process, we will also change the culture 
of our organization. 
CPI seeks incremental improvement that is not drastic. CPI takes a long term 
incremental approach when in cooperating CPI. The goal of CPI is to improve business 
process by introduce some moderate changes that are generally incremental in nature. In 
order to improve efficiency and effectiveness in CPI, employees involve in process to look 
ways to incrementally improve it. 
These means making moderate changes to the ways the company operates its business 
to take advantage of new opportunities offered by technology or copy the competitor is doing 
in order to improve the efficiency and effectiveness.
SEMESTER SEPTEMBER 2014 – JANUARY 2015 
STEP TO ENSURE SUCCESFUL IMPLEMENTATION BPR 
3 | P a g e 
 PREPARE FOR REENGINEERING 
Company must recognise the need of BPR. It is necessary to perform BPR. The company has 
to decide whether to reengineer or not. BPR activity needs to begin with a clearly define and 
measureable objective. Whether the goal is reducing cost, improving quality of product or 
increasing efficiency, the framework for what need to be achieve has to be decided and in 
line with the company vision and mission. Another important factor to be considered is to 
understand the customer expectation where the existing process fails to meet those 
requirements. In other word, the company should identify the process that are strategic and 
have value to customer. 
 ASSESMENT 
In this stage, company identify the main problem an obtain detail understanding of the 
process. It involves an understanding of the process structure in term of cost, timing and how 
it flow within organizations. All process need to be studied and those seen as slacking or that 
can be improve need to be identify and this process should not clash with company vision and 
mission. In order to get detail understanding, the fact gathering technique can be used such as 
interview user and do observation. The scope of the selected process for the reengineering 
process needs to be clearly defined. 
 SOLUTION 
During this stage, the BPR process now moves from concept or idea to details system also 
known as physical system design. The senior management take responsibility for 
implementing the objective of the BPR by empowering the reengineering team. 
 BENCHMARKING 
The focus of this stage is to find different approach to manage a process. By having 
benchmarking together with experience and expertise of team members help to introduce a 
creative approach to manage the process.
SEMESTER SEPTEMBER 2014 – JANUARY 2015 
4 | P a g e 
 DEVELOPMENT OF THE PROCESS AND TESTING 
People, process and technology are integrated at this point. Under this stage, the process are 
actually being develop and being tested. For example, before the product is launch a 
prototype is tested out if the result is positive the company should launch the product. 
However, if the result is negative the company shouldn’t launch the product and take a 
corrective action to ratify the problem of the product. 
 IMPLEMENT SYSTEM 
After the process being develop, the user should be provided with a working system that will 
describe how user will use the new process. After the process is completed and being 
implement for certain period of time a post implementation review is perform in order to 
evaluate the new system whether it meet the goal set for it.
SEMESTER SEPTEMBER 2014 – JANUARY 2015 
5 | P a g e 
ADVANTAGE AND DISADVANTAGE OF BPR 
It is important to acknowledge and understand that BPR is not a foolproof method of 
success. As with all activities it runs the risk of failure. 
There are several advantages of BPR that are customer needs are made the priority 
and this vision is use to appropriately direct business practices. Besides that, there a cost 
advantages to be achieve that help the organizations become more competitive in its 
industries. A strategic view of all operational process is taken with relevant question being 
ask about the establish way of work and how it can be developed over the long term into 
more efficient business practices. Furthermore there is willingness to look beyond task and 
traditional functional boundaries with force outcomes. Through this, entire processes can be 
eliminated or amalgamated into fewer but more relevant and powerful processes throughout 
the organization. There is real desire to simplify the way of work by objectively accessing all 
activities and task and eliminating any that act less value and more complexity. 
BPR does not always success it’s also have disadvantages that are it is seem as a 
way to make minor adjustment and improvement to existing process. If there is no clear 
willingness to put all existing process onto the chopping block, there is no change of success. 
It is also a one-time cost cutting exercise. In reality, cost reduction is often a handy by 
product of the activity but not the primary consent. It is also not a one-time activity but an 
ongoing change in mind set. There is no success in gaining dedicated long term commitment 
from management and the employees. Bringing people onboard is a difficult task and many 
BPR initiatives never take off because enough effort is not put into securing support. 
Furthermore one department is prioritized at the expanse of the process. There needs to be an 
openness towards studying every single process in detail and a willingness to change whether 
is needed to achieve overall efficiency. There is too much internal focus and not enough of an 
eye on the industry and what competitor’s best practices can be use as benchmark.
SEMESTER SEPTEMBER 2014 – JANUARY 2015 
6 | P a g e 
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BPR AND CPI 
Business process improvement means making moderate change to the way in which 
the organization operates to take advantage of new opportunities offered by the technology or 
to copy what competitors are doing. It also can improve efficiency and improve effectiveness 
as well. Meanwhile, BPR is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business 
process to achieve dramatic improvement in performance such as cost, quality, service and 
speed. 
In term of management involvement, CPI involve employee at all level and 
emphasises continuous improvement of work processes whereas BPR involve managers in a 
hands-on role. This is because BPR often lead to changes in organizational structure and 
redesign of job. In the CPI team members, are involved on an “as needed” basis over an 
extended time frame. Involvement of team members is more intense in case of BPR. It is 
often on a regular basis over a shorter time frame. 
Under CPI successive incremental improvement are achieve over a period of time, 
starting from how a work process operate currently and improving upon it. BPR is done 
periodically and it focus is on achieving dramatic improvement. It involve radically 
redesigning how a process operates without being restricted by how thing were being done 
earlier. 
The incremental improvements made in CPI add up to significant overall 
improvement for a firm. BPR focus on outcome and on achieving breakthrough improvement 
at one time unlike CPI. In CPI the focus is usually on narrowly define process. These often 
involve employees working to improve a sub process which is part of a higher level process. 
BPR need to focus on broad-based cross-functional process which span the major part of an 
entire organizational system. 
Organizations using only CPI occasionally prevent themselves by redesigning a 
form, creating a new piece of correspondence etc. With BPR, information systems 
technology often helps to achieve radical improvement in cycle-time reduction, information 
access and elimination of paper trail. Organization that value improvement should encourage 
or even mandate their employees input on improvement opportunities. Employees should 
look at every process with scope for improvement in their mind.
SEMESTER SEPTEMBER 2014 – JANUARY 2015 
7 | P a g e 
CONCLUSION 
BPR is a radical change activity that cannot be repeated if it goes wrong the first 
time. It is often a high risk activity that involves monetary investment and a risk of 
demotivated employee. It is essential to have buy in all the way from management down and 
it should have a broad functional scope. 
Successful BPR can potentially create substantial improvements in the way 
organizations do business and can actually produce fundamental improvements for business 
operation. However, in order to achieve that there are some key success factors that must be 
taken into consideration when performing BPR. Organization planning to undertake BPR 
must taken into consideration the success factors of BPR in order to ensure that their 
reengineering related change efforts are comprehensive, well implemented, and have 
minimum chance of failure, 
CPI is a great ways for the company to identify opportunity and integrate 
improvement into the day-to-day working of the company. Once CPI has become second 
nature within the organizational culture your team will begin to find opportunity in the most 
unexpected places, creative an environment that nurtures innovation and fosters a sense of 
ownership and pride among individuals.
SEMESTER SEPTEMBER 2014 – JANUARY 2015 
8 | P a g e 
REFERENCES 
 Khashi’ah Yusof (2009), Analysis and Design for accounting students, 3rd edition, pg 
74 – 77, Mc Graw Hill Education 
 Kim Langfield (2012), Management Accounting, 6th Edition, pg 744 – 745, Mc Graw 
Hill Education. 
 http://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/different-between-continous- improvement-and-process- 
reengineering/21131 
 http://www.entrepreneurial- insights.com/business-competitives-business-process-reengineering- 
bpr/ 
 Criatiana Bogdanoui (2012), Business process reengineering method versus kaizen 
method, Faculty of financial Accounting Management Craiova, Romania 
 J. Chris White (2014), Reengineering and Continuous Improvement, Retrieved from 
www.qualitydigest.com

business process reingeenering

  • 1.
    SEMESTER SEPTEMBER 2014– JANUARY 2015 1 | P a g e INTRODUCTION The concept of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is to rethink and breakdown existing business process. This allows a company to reduce cost and improve productivity through newer, more efficient process. It is important to remember however, though there are instances where these is necessary, BPR is not without its disadvantage. This makes it vital to weight your decision carefully. One of the most obvious adverse effects of a company’s decision to reengineer is lowered employee morale. Most people are vary of changes and do not manage to adapt to it easily. These aspect need to keep in mind when trying to make decision to go through with the activity.
  • 2.
    SEMESTER SEPTEMBER 2014– JANUARY 2015 DEFINITION BUSINESS REENGINEERING PROCESS (BPR) 2 | P a g e AND CONTINUOUS PROCESS IMPROVEMENT (CPI) According to Hammer and Champy, BPR is the fundamental rethink and radical redesign of business process to achieve dramatic improvement in performance such as cost, quality, service, speed etc. In BPR the organization need to go back to the basic and re-examine their roots. It doesn’t believe in small improvement rather it aims at total reinvention. BPR focus more on process and not on task, job or people. For example, we do not redesign personnel but we redesign the hiring process. The entire technological human and organization unit maybe change in BPR. It is important to us to understand that a significant business process can involve multiple organizational units. When we doing BPR it not only affects the process but also affect the people completing the process, the skill factor required and the organizational procedure for managing those people. In BPR when we change the process, we will also change the culture of our organization. CPI seeks incremental improvement that is not drastic. CPI takes a long term incremental approach when in cooperating CPI. The goal of CPI is to improve business process by introduce some moderate changes that are generally incremental in nature. In order to improve efficiency and effectiveness in CPI, employees involve in process to look ways to incrementally improve it. These means making moderate changes to the ways the company operates its business to take advantage of new opportunities offered by technology or copy the competitor is doing in order to improve the efficiency and effectiveness.
  • 3.
    SEMESTER SEPTEMBER 2014– JANUARY 2015 STEP TO ENSURE SUCCESFUL IMPLEMENTATION BPR 3 | P a g e  PREPARE FOR REENGINEERING Company must recognise the need of BPR. It is necessary to perform BPR. The company has to decide whether to reengineer or not. BPR activity needs to begin with a clearly define and measureable objective. Whether the goal is reducing cost, improving quality of product or increasing efficiency, the framework for what need to be achieve has to be decided and in line with the company vision and mission. Another important factor to be considered is to understand the customer expectation where the existing process fails to meet those requirements. In other word, the company should identify the process that are strategic and have value to customer.  ASSESMENT In this stage, company identify the main problem an obtain detail understanding of the process. It involves an understanding of the process structure in term of cost, timing and how it flow within organizations. All process need to be studied and those seen as slacking or that can be improve need to be identify and this process should not clash with company vision and mission. In order to get detail understanding, the fact gathering technique can be used such as interview user and do observation. The scope of the selected process for the reengineering process needs to be clearly defined.  SOLUTION During this stage, the BPR process now moves from concept or idea to details system also known as physical system design. The senior management take responsibility for implementing the objective of the BPR by empowering the reengineering team.  BENCHMARKING The focus of this stage is to find different approach to manage a process. By having benchmarking together with experience and expertise of team members help to introduce a creative approach to manage the process.
  • 4.
    SEMESTER SEPTEMBER 2014– JANUARY 2015 4 | P a g e  DEVELOPMENT OF THE PROCESS AND TESTING People, process and technology are integrated at this point. Under this stage, the process are actually being develop and being tested. For example, before the product is launch a prototype is tested out if the result is positive the company should launch the product. However, if the result is negative the company shouldn’t launch the product and take a corrective action to ratify the problem of the product.  IMPLEMENT SYSTEM After the process being develop, the user should be provided with a working system that will describe how user will use the new process. After the process is completed and being implement for certain period of time a post implementation review is perform in order to evaluate the new system whether it meet the goal set for it.
  • 5.
    SEMESTER SEPTEMBER 2014– JANUARY 2015 5 | P a g e ADVANTAGE AND DISADVANTAGE OF BPR It is important to acknowledge and understand that BPR is not a foolproof method of success. As with all activities it runs the risk of failure. There are several advantages of BPR that are customer needs are made the priority and this vision is use to appropriately direct business practices. Besides that, there a cost advantages to be achieve that help the organizations become more competitive in its industries. A strategic view of all operational process is taken with relevant question being ask about the establish way of work and how it can be developed over the long term into more efficient business practices. Furthermore there is willingness to look beyond task and traditional functional boundaries with force outcomes. Through this, entire processes can be eliminated or amalgamated into fewer but more relevant and powerful processes throughout the organization. There is real desire to simplify the way of work by objectively accessing all activities and task and eliminating any that act less value and more complexity. BPR does not always success it’s also have disadvantages that are it is seem as a way to make minor adjustment and improvement to existing process. If there is no clear willingness to put all existing process onto the chopping block, there is no change of success. It is also a one-time cost cutting exercise. In reality, cost reduction is often a handy by product of the activity but not the primary consent. It is also not a one-time activity but an ongoing change in mind set. There is no success in gaining dedicated long term commitment from management and the employees. Bringing people onboard is a difficult task and many BPR initiatives never take off because enough effort is not put into securing support. Furthermore one department is prioritized at the expanse of the process. There needs to be an openness towards studying every single process in detail and a willingness to change whether is needed to achieve overall efficiency. There is too much internal focus and not enough of an eye on the industry and what competitor’s best practices can be use as benchmark.
  • 6.
    SEMESTER SEPTEMBER 2014– JANUARY 2015 6 | P a g e DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BPR AND CPI Business process improvement means making moderate change to the way in which the organization operates to take advantage of new opportunities offered by the technology or to copy what competitors are doing. It also can improve efficiency and improve effectiveness as well. Meanwhile, BPR is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business process to achieve dramatic improvement in performance such as cost, quality, service and speed. In term of management involvement, CPI involve employee at all level and emphasises continuous improvement of work processes whereas BPR involve managers in a hands-on role. This is because BPR often lead to changes in organizational structure and redesign of job. In the CPI team members, are involved on an “as needed” basis over an extended time frame. Involvement of team members is more intense in case of BPR. It is often on a regular basis over a shorter time frame. Under CPI successive incremental improvement are achieve over a period of time, starting from how a work process operate currently and improving upon it. BPR is done periodically and it focus is on achieving dramatic improvement. It involve radically redesigning how a process operates without being restricted by how thing were being done earlier. The incremental improvements made in CPI add up to significant overall improvement for a firm. BPR focus on outcome and on achieving breakthrough improvement at one time unlike CPI. In CPI the focus is usually on narrowly define process. These often involve employees working to improve a sub process which is part of a higher level process. BPR need to focus on broad-based cross-functional process which span the major part of an entire organizational system. Organizations using only CPI occasionally prevent themselves by redesigning a form, creating a new piece of correspondence etc. With BPR, information systems technology often helps to achieve radical improvement in cycle-time reduction, information access and elimination of paper trail. Organization that value improvement should encourage or even mandate their employees input on improvement opportunities. Employees should look at every process with scope for improvement in their mind.
  • 7.
    SEMESTER SEPTEMBER 2014– JANUARY 2015 7 | P a g e CONCLUSION BPR is a radical change activity that cannot be repeated if it goes wrong the first time. It is often a high risk activity that involves monetary investment and a risk of demotivated employee. It is essential to have buy in all the way from management down and it should have a broad functional scope. Successful BPR can potentially create substantial improvements in the way organizations do business and can actually produce fundamental improvements for business operation. However, in order to achieve that there are some key success factors that must be taken into consideration when performing BPR. Organization planning to undertake BPR must taken into consideration the success factors of BPR in order to ensure that their reengineering related change efforts are comprehensive, well implemented, and have minimum chance of failure, CPI is a great ways for the company to identify opportunity and integrate improvement into the day-to-day working of the company. Once CPI has become second nature within the organizational culture your team will begin to find opportunity in the most unexpected places, creative an environment that nurtures innovation and fosters a sense of ownership and pride among individuals.
  • 8.
    SEMESTER SEPTEMBER 2014– JANUARY 2015 8 | P a g e REFERENCES  Khashi’ah Yusof (2009), Analysis and Design for accounting students, 3rd edition, pg 74 – 77, Mc Graw Hill Education  Kim Langfield (2012), Management Accounting, 6th Edition, pg 744 – 745, Mc Graw Hill Education.  http://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/different-between-continous- improvement-and-process- reengineering/21131  http://www.entrepreneurial- insights.com/business-competitives-business-process-reengineering- bpr/  Criatiana Bogdanoui (2012), Business process reengineering method versus kaizen method, Faculty of financial Accounting Management Craiova, Romania  J. Chris White (2014), Reengineering and Continuous Improvement, Retrieved from www.qualitydigest.com