Stage 4: Full scale development

This stage is the actual development of the new process. As with any major organizational change, a methodical process should be adopted that takes advantage of small-scale pilot projects completed in the previous stage. This stage is the most important one in the entire reengineering project. After this point, resources will be expended much more quickly than before and knowledge of the BPR project will be spread beyond the BPR core team. Whereas before the reengineered process was an opportunity and a compelling vision, now it becomes a concrete roadmap with detailed milestones and requires a lot of hard work and difficult change.

22. Define full scale BPR development plan:

There are two dimensions to the development plan; ie., technical and social (Manganelli & Klein, 1994). For the technical aspect, the development plan defines the tasks of process design and system development with respect to scope, quality, time and cost. To the social aspect, the development plan defines the

appropriate organization of resources and responsibilities to carry out and monitor the future process.

23. Detailed process design:

There are six key elements to depict the process details (Reijersa and Mansarb, 2005)

 Customer: the internal or external customers of the business process

 Output: the products (or services) generated by the business process

 Workflow (with two views):

 Operation view: how is a process operation implemented in terms of number of tasks, relative size of tasks, nature of tasks, degree of customization?

 Behavior view: when is a process executed in terms of sequencing of tasks, task consolidation, scheduling of jobs, etc?

 Participants: the organization or individual directly or indirectly involved in executing the process in terms of users, groups, departments, etc.

 Information: the data that the business process uses or creates.

 Technology: the business process uses to generate output, control quality, or monitor the progress.

Based on the key elements depicted above, one common tool used to illustrate the process activity with a structured way is ICOM (Input, Control, Output, and Mechanism), as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4 BPR design Tool: ICOM

24. Ask feedback form user group and modify the process design:

Unlike the prototype and pilot processes that are implemented in a controlled environment with limited functions, the scope and depth of new process defined in this stage are more extensive and have profound impact to the future operation.

The purpose of collecting feedback from user group at this stage is two folds: one is to confirm the completeness, effectiveness, and feasibility of the complete new processes; and the other is to assess the readiness of the user group to the significant change made by the new process. If any design flaw identified by the user group, which will impede BPR from reaching the desired goal, the BPR team needs to tune the process before it is released to the company.

25. Set the performance target of the new business process:

Unlike the high level BPR objectives defined in the activity 6 which set the direction and vision of the BPR in consideration, the performance target set at this stage is more specific, detailed-oriented, and measurable. For example, a manufacturing department sets it’s productivity target as twice as many as current output, and sets the operation cycle time as 0.5 day per unit with high quality result as 1 ppm (parts per million). An IT department set its target operation cycle time as 3 seconds per order transaction with 99.5% system operation up time.

Material or information that is consumed or transformed by the activity

Input

Control

(Rules/regulations)

Govern how or under what condition an activity is performed

Resources that perform the activity

Activity

A function transforms input into output

26. Determine enabling technologies:

Information technology is considered not only to automate a process but also actually create new process design alternatives. In a successful project, business process reengineering and the deployment of IT are viewed as mutually supportive and synergistic activities (Davenport and Short, 1990). The reengineering project must identify enabling information technologies that provide the opportunity to improve internal efficiency, satisfy customers, and allow organizations to ignore geography (Guha et al 1993). The application of IT in integrating various functional areas to reengineer business process is presented in Table 7. In reengineering the business process, the IT plays a major role to integrate various functional areas for reducing the cycle time for the delivery process of the goods/services (Gunasekaran and Nath, 1997).

Table 7 Key Information technology for BPR

Functional areas Information technologies Marketing Multimedia, internet, database

Maintenance AI, expert system, scheduling, database Distribution Internet, RFID, GPS, EDI

Personnel Internet, Multimedia training, database Accounting ERP, shared database, spread sheet Design and Engineering CAD, CAM, database, ED1 Purchasing Internet, database, MRP,

Production CAM, CIM, multimedia, MRP, database, RFID,EDI, SPC

27. Develop IT systems:

This task is concerned with the design and construction of the new or revised system supporting the reengineered process. The IT system development mainly consists of process and data areas. In the process area, it includes modeling of

sub-processes, segregation of the business rules into system modules, interconnection among the modules, and interface with end users of the system. In the data area, it includes defining the attributes of data entity involved in the process, mapping the attributes into database schema, and specifying how the relationships among data entities. If the application is based on a package, the next step involves selecting the package options, designing extensions or modifications to the package, building interfaces between the package and other systems. If the application is custom developed, the next step is to build the physical data structure and write the code according to the defined business logics.

28. Conduct integration test:

Testing is a sequence of steps that determines whether the functions properly are performed according to the original design. A business process is often composed of several interdependent sub-processes to carry out certain sub-function;

consequently the supporting IT system is decomposed into several modules accordingly to satisfy the need of each sub-process. Before conducting the test, the BPR team needs to map the business processes into different scenarios, and then organize each scenario into multiple test cases. The testing life cycle progresses from module, system, to integration test. The module test focusing on testing basic features of each individual module; the system test is the aggregation of multiple module tests; and the integration test focuses entirely on the application system from an overall perspective. Additional testing is usually performed to determine the behavior of the system under stress, to compare the results of the new system with that of the old, and to develop client comfort with the system (Manganelli & Klein, 1994).

29. Report to BPR development result to senior management:

At this stage, the new business process, its supporting IT system, and new performance goal are completed. It’s ready to roll out the new process to the entire company. This all-encompassing development requires the attention and endorsement of senior management. The management team needs to ensure the active participation of the employees impacted by the new process for smooth operation transition.