ASSIGNMENT

PGDM Batch 2018-2020

Academic Session 2019-20
Term – VI
Mid Term Evaluation

Subject : Business Process Re-engineering Submitted By : Aman Singh

Faculty Name : Dr Dileep Singh Roll No. : GM18025
Subject Code : PGO10
QUESTION 1. Explain BPR implementation which can be possible in Management
education enhance quality.
ANSWER1. A number of UK Higher Education Institutions are currently attempting to use
Business Process Re-Engineering (BPR) as a change management strategy to obtain
improvements in service.Despite the great potential for use of IT in higher education, it is not
a common feature of teaching and learning in most institutions . This is a further pressure for
change as HEIs must take advantage of IT developments to improve course delivery and
reduce costs.  the present higher education system as being too fragmented, wasteful and
inefficient. It is characterised by too many students participating in the same activities (e.g.
lectures) at the same time. Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) has been identified in
some quarters as a means by which universities can meet these pressures for change, utilising
IT to increase efficiency and effectiveness .BPR could enable HEIs to develop organisational
structures that enable innovative teaching and learning methods, whilst maintaining some
element of the important student-teacher relationship. BPR has significant potential for re-
engineering the administrative functions of universities and ensuring control of higher
education’s costs.
BPR involves identification of the key business objectives of the organisation, and ensuring
effective attainment of these objectives by redesigning business processes. Instead of the
rigid functional boundaries represented by say, a ‘sales department’ and a ‘purchasing
department’, roles and tasks are grouped around key business processes. in the current
situation, HEI departments work primarily on an independent basis. Arguments for re-
engineering HEIs, advocate the establishment of institution-wide processes and dependencies
across departmental boundaries. The motivation for this is the application of technology in
organisations was often more to do with automating existing processes , what can be
described as automating ‘the existing mess’. Most work flows and job descriptions were
developed before computers were introduced into organisations; processes have evolved
rather than been designed . BPR has the potential to focus the re-engineered organisation’s
efforts on value-adding tasks, and reduce the number of workers required to perform a task.
The processes that are re-engineered must be core processes, vital to the business, or
initiatives will have little impact on overall performance .If a core business element of an HEI
is effective student learning, then a BPR initiative would attempt to utilise IT to link teaching
and learning processes across the functional boundaries of academic departments.
Re-engineering strives to counter poor responsiveness to customer needs point to the fact that
customers are the real judges of service quality, but that this is not reflected in management
decision making. Value is added when an organisation’s activities are shaped to directly meet
customer demands. For instance, the intention when re-engineering administrative processes
in HEIs, is to make processes more student centred: processes should exist to meet students’
needs .Successful BPR requires that processes are broadly defined in terms of customer (or
cost) value, to improve performance across the entire business unit . In HEIs, the diagnostic
phase would involve surveying both employees (academics, support staff) and customers
(students) regarding their opinions on the services provided by the university. Above all,
diagnosis is used to identify customers’ service expectations.
Re-engineering results in a workforce characterised by teams of multi-skilled flexible
individuals, empowered by technological innovation. Bureaucratic delays are wiped out as
employees in re-engineered organisations are empowered to contact sources of knowledge
direct, side-stepping several tiers of management to complete what may previously have been
a long cumbersome process in minutes. Empowerment is an important feature of BPR .
Employees are held accountable for the success of the organisation; empowerment means that
individual efforts can contribute directly to organisational success. As re-engineered jobs are
organised around outcomes, employees perform all steps in a process rather than just a list of
tasks.
Implementing a BPR project is far from a straightforward activity. It has not exactly been an
unqualified success in the private sector, where following many failures it is now a widely
derided practice .70% of BPR programmes fail. A main reason for this high failure rate is
thought to be BPR’s failure to successfully take account of people in the re-engineering of
processes: treating these people as ‘bits and bytes’ to be re-engineered .the rhetoric
surrounding BPR is powerful, confident and persuasive, but its computer science and
engineering roots lead to it having a limited appreciation of the human dimension of
organisational change. People are seen as more important than production. BPR tends to
counter years of employee commitment when processes are radically revised. If employee
resistance occurs, it represents inertia and can be dealt with provided that senior management
are sufficiently persuasive. BPR fails to take account of the fact that employee objections
might be legitimate.
HEIs now have strategic plans which might be seen as useful for formulating BPR initiatives.
However, a university is a highly complex organisation where there are many different ideas
about what the university is trying to achieve . Taylor comments that the situation is less
problematic in companies, where the executive define the mission and everyone is expected
to work towards that mission. The mission of HEIs is complicated by a tradition of academic
freedom in which individual academics develop autonomously; management style tends
towards administrative rather than proactive leadership . Academic freedom has been
somewhat countered in the 1990s, in that academics are subject to an increasing number of
accountability mechanisms, such as Teaching Quality assessments . Nonetheless, despite
these increasing constraints, BPR initiatives in higher education will face a culture of
individualism in higher education; any BPR project will have to overcome this problem . The
concern might be that staff feel demoralised at the loss of ‘academic freedom’, creating an
atmosphere that is not conducive to innovation and improved performance . Change in
Higher Education has tended to restrict academic freedom, so further radical change is
unlikely to be welcomed . For instance, at the University of East Anglia some faculty
perceived the introduction of modular courses and semesters as restrictive, rather than a
means for providing students with greater flexibility (the intended purpose. Academics will
also be concerned that re-engineering is a threat to their professional status, as their role
might change to that of managing and building learning resources. Empowerment might be
emphasised as a major feature of BPR, but re-engineering programmes tend to be very
authoritarian.
QUESTION 2.Briefly explain AS-IS model in Business Process Re-engineering.
ANSWER 2An “as is” business process defines the current state of the business process in a
organization. Typically the analysis goal in putting together the current state process is to
clarify exactly how the business process works today, kinks and all.An “as is” business
process contains all of the sections in a typical business process model – a description, list of
roles, list of steps and exceptions, etc. When putting together an “as is” process, access to
business stakeholders who perform the business process is key. Secondarily, access to
business stakeholders who understand the process (such as a manager or subject matter
expert) can be helpful, even if these individuals do not routinely perform the business
process.
You’ll need at least one stakeholder to represent each role in the process. For example, for a
process describing how a new customer gets set up, you may need representatives from sales,
customer service, and fulfillment. Once you determine who needs to be involved, you can
elicit information about the current state using a variety of different methods. Interviews and
observation tend to be the best elicitation techniques to understand the current state process.
Once you are able to put together a draft, a document review can be used to confirm your
understanding and fill in any knowledge gaps. It’s not always necessary to document the
current state, but it can be extremely helpful in giving your project team a foundation from
which to build new enhancements or make business process improvements.
Here are some scenarios when starting with the current state is particularly appropriate:
 There are known issues with the current state, such as orders not getting processed or
customers being frustrated with your organization’s level of service.
 Business users are confused about what the right process is or what steps to take in
what situations.
 Your organization wants to automate or streamline the current processes, but the
current state is not well understood or documented.
Often in bringing together stakeholders and analysing the current state processes, you can’t
help but improve them, at least slightly. The clarity that comes from good business process
documentation can, on its own, sometimes resolve confusions and fill in the gaps that are
causing issues. But many times, documenting the current state is an interim analysis step to
improving the current state by creating a new “to be” or future state process.
QUESTION 3. Explain the concept of BPR and brief its importance in Indian Industrial
scenario.
ANSWER 3The Business Process Reengineering or BPR is the analysis and redesign of
core business processes to achieve the substantial improvements in its performance,
productivity, and quality. The business process refers to the set of interlinked tasks or
activities performed to achieve a specified outcome.Simply, the business process
reengineering means to change the way an individual performs the work such that better
results are accomplished. The purpose of business process reengineering is to redesign the
workflows in order to dramatically improve the customer service, achieve higher levels of
efficiency, cut operational costs and become a world-class competitor.the business process
reengineering focuses on obtaining the quantum gains in terms of cost, time, output, quality
and responsiveness towards customers. Also, it emphasizes on simplifying and streamlining
the business process by eliminating the unnecessary or time-consuming business activities
and speeding up the workflow by making the use of high-tech systems.Business Process
Reengineering involves tinkering with the organization’s DNA and producing an evolved
species. The mistake companies tend to make is pick the wrong process to be reengineered,
or make only superficial changes.
BPR has aimed at radical improvements by means of elevating efficiency and effectiveness
of the business processes that exist within and across department. The key for BPR is to look
at business processes from a “clean slate” perspective and determine how they can best
construct these processes to improve the way business is conducted. Department of Posts
occasionally conducts workshops related to BPR involving the people such as Nodal Officers
who are part of BPR strategy and implementation. India Post has been making several
upgradations to existing systems and has started offering bouquet of services such as Money
Transfers, One-stop bill payment (Telephone, electricity), Driving license renewals etc.
Speed Post, started by Department of Posts in August 1986 for providing time-bound and
express delivery of letters’ documents and parcels across the nation and abroad, is the market
leader in the domestic express industry.
Through ePOST service launched in 2004, customers can send their messages to any address
in India with a combination of electronic transmission and physical delivery through a
network of more than 1,55,000 Post Offices. ePOST sends messages as a soft copy through
internet and delivered to the addressee in the form of hard copy at nominal charge of Rs 10
per A4 sheet.ePayment is a comprehensive bill payment service offered by India Post to help
meet the needs of the business customers. This allows collection of bills (telephone bills,
electricity bills, university fee, school fee, insurance premiaetc) on behalf of any
organization. The collection is consolidated electronically using web based software and
payment is made centrally through cheque from a specified post office. The payment
information can be assessed online by the user.Instant Money Order (iMO), the instant on-
line money transfer service, provides speed, mobility, safety and reliability for money
transfer. IMO is an instant web based money transfer service through Post Offices (iMO
Centre) in India between two resident individuals in Indian territory.
Though the number of services offered is many, still huge gaps exist in quality as compared
to international standards. To enable Department of Posts to achieve the business objectives
of becoming the IT enabled complete service provider, Project Management Unit have been
entrusted with the task of creating state of the art electronic network covering all its offices
and all products and services including third party services and enable electronic transmission
of information for conducting & monitoring operations, consolidating transactions data and
generating an effective MIS. Business Process Reengineering groups were formed and their
reports are being evaluated by concerned Divisions of Directorate, which would form the
base to make the comprehensive IT strategy and roadmap for Department of Posts.State Bank
of India is one such example which had undertaken a massive computerization effort to
automate all it’s branches, implementing a highly customized version of Bankmaster core
banking system. However, because of Bank’s historic use of manual systems void of
centralization and problems in communication systems, it had to resort to decentralized
system to start with. The need for reengineering arose because SBI along with other public
sector counterparts started losing existing customers and were handicapped to tap the ever
growing potential of middle class.
In 2000, SBI engaged KPMG for this overhaul and in 2002, KPMG recommended an IT
driven systems to counter the private players’ led competition. To start with 3300 branches
were selected for implementation which was later expanded to 14600 of SBI & affiliate
branches considering unparalleled success. SBI planned to provide a single window system,
better customer service, wanted to reach out to urban as well as rural population and control
the customer switching along with many other objectives that it sought. The biggest problem
that drove this restructuring for this Public sector giant was that since branches were not
connected, the customer was a ‘Branch’ customer rather than a ‘Bank’ customer. Moreover
Information Technology till now, was aimed only at internal efficiency. Hence, it was
planned to share operations for back-office functions and rework the workflows and
processes.
It is not only the old stalwarts who have reengineered. Even the private sector and novice
companies in upcoming sectors have seen this change. For Spencer’s, RPG Group’s retail
chain, massive ramp-up in operations necessitated a series of restructurings. The chain
planned to increase from an area of 2.5 lakh square feet to 15 lakh square ft i.e. from 52 to
400 stores. This meant that the older systems were no longer adequate. Hence, instead of
doing an incremental improvement on the existing processes, the company introduced an
automatic replenishment system. This has resulted in decreased stockouts and increasing
efficiency. It may be concluded that BPR initiatives have less to do with controlling costs and
more about managing business, which underlines the importance of this concept.
QUESTION 4. Explain the role of Information Technology (IT) in BPR.
ANSWER 4. Business process Reengineering needs some tools to take place these tools are
called enablers , as it is the processes of having something new at work, it may be about that
how to do the work or how to acquire the work, whatever the main concern of BPR,
Information Technology is the main enabler. IT has an important role in the reengineering to
be set in , many studies have proved it that IT is the Basic capacitor to change in the process
or redesigning of the system.
Some of the examples of using IT in the process are: the use of relational database,
technology of imaging, data exchange on electronic mode and funds management. The as the
degree of collaboration will be higher the effectiveness of the system will be more. The
processes can be define in to three different types like inter-organization processes, inter-
function processes and interpersonal processes these classifications have been made on the
bases of entities and activates involves in it Davenport and Short (1990) The example of the
use of information technology in inter-organization process is like using relational data bases,
networking like LAN and exchange of data within the organization. On the other hand inter-
functional process includes the teleconferences and other networks through telecom. The use
of IT in inter-personal process includes biometrics systems implementation for the purpose of
security.Operational processes can be reengineered through the IT as an enabler like the
softwares like Data Base Management Systems and emails. They have a direct impact on the
cost effectiveness of the system. The Managerial processes involve the executive tasks like
decision making for this purpose the information technology tools like Decision support
system and Expert systems are used.
Information technology is defined as possibilities offered to organisations computers,
software applications, and telecommunication for data; provide information and knowledge
to individuals and processes. For long, the industrial engineers have used in the processing
industry as analytical and modelling appliances. Common use of IT in the industry includes
production planning and control, process modelling, material management information
systems, and logistical. IT has the agency and the service environment since the 80s
penetrated. The shift from mainframe to PC-based technology down communication barriers
between employees and customers. Now that design managers and employees of various
departments and monitor complex business information systems. Formerly led by centralized
MIS departments. IT is possible means to improve information access and coordination
across organizational units. IT is a powerful tool so that the new process design options can
actually lead rather than to make it easy to support..
QUESTION 5. With reference to an Automobile Industry as an example, outline
various automation options available to you for BPR.
ANSWER 5. One of the most referenced business process reengineering examples is the case
of Ford, an automobile manufacturing company.In the 1980s, the American automobile
industry was in a depression, and in an attempt to cut costs, Ford decided to scrutinize some
of their departments in an attempt to find inefficient processes.
One of their findings was that the accounts payable department was not as efficient as it could
be: their accounts payable division consisted of 500 people, as opposed to Mazda’s (their
partner) 5.
While Mazda was a smaller company, Ford estimated that their department was still 5 times
bigger than it should have been.Accordingly, Ford management set themselves a quantifiable
goal: to reduce the number of clerks working in accounts payable by a couple of
hundred employees. Then, they launched a business process reengineering initiative to figure
out why was the department so overstaffed.
They analyzed the current system, and found out that it worked as follows:
1. When the purchasing department would write a purchase order, they sent a copy to
accounts payable.
2. Then, the material control would receive the goods, and send a copy of the related
document to accounts payable.
3. At the same time, the vendor would send a receipt for the goods to accounts payable.
Then, the clerk at the accounts payable department would have to match the three orders, and
if they matched, he or she would issue the payment. This, of course, took a lot of manpower
in the department.

Old Payable Process

So, as is the case with BPR, Ford completely recreated the process digitally.
 1. Purchasing issues an order and inputs it into an online database.
2. Material control receives the goods and cross-references with the database to make
sure it matches an order.
3. If there’s a match, material control accepts the order on the computer.

New payable process

This way, the need for accounts payable clerks to match the orders was completely
eliminated.