Stage 2: Study

The study stage ensures that careful preparation is conducted in anticipation of organization-wide radical change. Reengineering projects must be staffed with the right team members to sustain the effort. The project should have definite performance goals that can later provide the metric for judging success, and these goals should be justified against anticipated costs. There are ten activities composing the stage of study.

9. Organize the BPR team:

Because the process of reengineering involves organizational design around processes rather than functional hierarchies, it is important that the team includes representatives from the primary organizational units involved in the process under consideration and members from various parts of the company. Executives and key staff members from different functional areas, as well as from the information systems unit, should be included on the project team. Furthermore, because by definition a business process has a well-defined customer (either internal or external to the company), it is important that the customer also be represented on the reengineering team (Alavi & Yoo, 1996). Due to the nature that the reengineered process will be new to most employees, companies often enlist

the help of consultants. Hiring those who have helped other companies adds valuable experience to the team and brings in an outsider's viewpoint and creativity.

10. Delineate the existing process:

To redesign a business process, the organization must clearly understand how the existing process works. There are five perspectives to depict a process (Jablonski and Bussler, 1996):

 Function perspective: what has to be executed?

 Operation perspective: how is a workflow implemented?

 Behavior perspective: when is a workflow executed?

 Information perspective: what data are consumed and produced?

 Organization perspective: who has to execute a workf1ow?

11. Measure and analyze the existing process:

During the study stage, the project team evaluates existing processes with the performance measurement indices defined in the previous stage. Process bottlenecks and pathologies are uncovered so that they could be eliminated in the reengineered process. Furthermore, the team accurately measures and documents the performance of the existing process against the established reengineering objectives to establish a baseline for determining the success of the reengineering project.

Atos Origin suggested analyze process from the perspectives of ‘activity’

and ‘role’, the details is depicted as following:

 Activity Analysis:

 How many steps does a process require?

 How many layers of the organization does a process require?

 How many hand-offs are required to complete a process?

 Role Analysis:

 Who, when, how, are they involved in the business process?

 Are they really needed? What’s the consequence if they are not involved?

 Any over- or under-capacity for the people in charge?

 Can people be replaced by IT? Any performance gap?

People and activity are two main objects that constitute a process. The role analysis is more qualitative oriented to examine the necessity, capability, and capacity of people involved in a process. Whereas the activity analysis is more quantitative oriented to review the umber of ‘parameter’ such as steps, organization layers, and interaction, required completing a process. More the instances of such parameters are, more cycle time and likelihood for a process introduces operation errors.

12. Diagnose the processes to be reengineered:

To uncover pathologies in the existing processes, a critique of the existing value and non-value-added activities should be conducted. The BPR team can identify the potential problems based on the qualitative and quantitative analysis result obtained from the last activity. Guha et al (1993) also suggested the following diagnose actions to take:

 Identifying undesirable sequential activities and unnecessary bureaucratic steps.

 Identifying functional information systems that can be integrated into a single process-wide system.

 Questioning the need for various forms, approvals, and reports and identifying all paper float and redundancies.

 Identifying dysfunctional policies and rules, formal as well as informal.

13. Propose concept of a new process design:

This activity allows the BPR team to construct a framework on which the new business process can build. Accenture suggested seven fundamental rules, as shown in Table 6, in consideration of process design. The key to successful redesign is to constantly question why a certain task is done, what are better ways of doing it, where is the most appropriate location to carry out, who should be responsible, and which information technology best supports the redesigned process.

Table 6 BPR Process Redesign Rules

14. Ask feedback from user group of processes under consideration:

The changes brought on by business process change may cause resentment.

Therefore, the feedbacks directly form the first-line workers who in charge of the existing process must be collected. Otherwise, these people would resist with fear, uncertainty, lower productivity, and lack of cooperation with the reengineering project. In order to foster positive results, the major user groups, when being asked the feedback, must be continually educated the fundamental change to the company brought by the new process. Being familiar with the current business process, the user group can evaluate the effectiveness of the concept of the

New technology

Assumption, Rational, Root Cause Object

Assumption, Rational, Root Cause Object

redesign and offer alternatives.

15. Design the prototype according to the proposed concept:

Prototyping is a useful tool for BPR team because it can be used to demonstrate proposed redesigns that would otherwise be difficult for people to comprehend. It creates rapid feedback that helps estimating and planning business and system scope required by the reengineered process.

16. Develop change management plan:

Resistance to change can be a critical failure factor in BPR projects. In such situation, the BPR team should address change management and human resource issues (Al-Mashari et al., 2001). The change management plan initiates by identifying the stakeholders and their interests. It defines how communications will be managed to ensure that the stakeholders are kept informed in a constructive way. Some stakeholders are people holding the same jobs; they usually have common interests. Other stakeholders hold unique jobs that are directly or indirectly related to the process being reengineered. While the employees are an obvious class of stakeholder, there are many others, such as customers, distributors, suppliers, and shareholders, etc, which should be incorporated in the change management plan as well. The change management should start as early as top management decides to engage BPR and should be continuous thorough the whole BPR project lifecycle. The key elements constituting a change management plan include

 Why the reengineering project is needed

 What is the scope of the BPR project

 What are the expectation results

 What is the BPR team composition and why

 What will happen during the project and when

 What will be the impact in terms of organization structure, job function, and performance measurement (Manganelli & Klein, 1994)

17. Ask feedback from user group and modify the prototype:

People who carry out the existing process and will be affected by new ones are the key communication target because their acceptance of the new process is critical to BPR success. The feedback collected from them at this stage primarily focuses on the operational and functional level such as whether all the major problems of the existing process are identified and whether the new process effectively addresses the problems. They are also very helpful to identify the designed flaws and explore the feasibility of the proposed prototyping.

18. Report BPR study result to senior management for approval to next stage:

At this stage, the reengineering team presents to the senior management the finding, root causes, recommended process design, prototyping, and change management plan. Senior management can examine the healthy situation of the company from the process’s perspective and decide the scope of the BPR project.

The estimated human and monetary resources of the BPR project need to be approved by senior management in order to proceed to the next stage.