Role of Business Process Reengineering in Information Technology

ROLE OF BUSINESS PROCESS REENGINEERING IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY:

 

BUSINESS PROCESS RE ENGINEERING:

 

Business Process Reengineering as the technique that concentrates on the process to bring about radical change in the organization facilitating dramatic improvement in performance in core business processes which are critical for competitive advantage. The main idea of Business Process Re engineering is reinventing the organization for increasing performance.

 

ROLE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN REENGINEERING:

 

Information technology is the technology of sensing, coding, transmitting, translating and transforming. The information technology is an integral part of reengineering a an enabler, since it permits companies to reengineer a business process. IT capabilities should support business processes, and business process should be in terms of the capabilities IT can provide.

 

IT plays an important role by either enabling or constraining successful BPR. IT can also become an inhibitor of reengineering if the organization’s IT infrastructure is inadequate or inflexible. The role of IT is to make a new process design possible. IF nothing changes about the way work is done and the role of IT is simply to automate an existing process, then economic benefits are likely to be minimal.

 

The applications of IT to reengineering require inductive thinking, which is the ability to first recognize a powerful solution and then seek the problems that it might solve. A fundamental error that most companies commit when they look at technology is to see how a new technology will help in solving problems in their existing process. The companies have to think how a technology can help them to do things that they are not doing in current process. Reengineering is about innovation. It is about exploiting the latest capabilities of technology to achieve entirely new objectives”

 

IT has a power to break the rules and make people think inductively and give the company a competitive advantage. The company that used the disruptive power of IT to break all rules and gain competitive advantage .The key effective use of IT lies not in moving the information faster but in doing right things with it. IT has to be used to make proactive decisions to improve business performance rather than report on it after the fact. In the design phase of implementation of reengineering, the capabilities of IT can be used to stimulate a model of the design and thereby validate the new design.

 

Super market like walmart has used IT to drive their business. The scanners that are used to check out commodities provide a huge benefit by making it possible to track sales in real time. A strong IT solution was developed to reduce the cahier labour in addition to tracking sales. It enables the super market to keep products available to the customer at all times and minimize cost related to inventory, obsolescence and spoilage. It is also used to make decision as when to order.

 

ROLE OF IT IN BPR WITH PRACTICAL EXAMPLE:

 

Information technology enables New Processes:

IT may help to devise innovative business processes, which would otherwise not to attainable.

Example: in an early Business Reengineering Project, the IBM credit corporation reorganized the crediting functions. Just one person (a so-called case manager) performs all the tasks of a former whole credit department by using a new computer application system.

Information technology tools help to facilitate project management:

Project management tools help to analyze processes, and define new processes. They can also be used to define the introduction of process oriented application software packages. According to recent study, the US $100 million tool market is broadening and rising at 40% per year.

Information technology lets people work together more closely:

            Traditional main frame- oriented information Processing was revolutionized in the 1980s by the personal computer (PC). Today, PCs are commonplace and mostly part of local Area Network (LAN), or even Wide Area Networks (WAN), which electronically link teams to allow non-physical collaborative work. Special software systems, like e-mail, groupware, workflow-management, teleconferencing, etc. are elements of this pervasive role than IT is taking.

Information technology helps to integrate businesses:

The process view of businesses includes the integration of business processes within a company and also between business partners (company and customers, as well as vendors). Companies are using SAP R/3 client/ server and competitive software (Oracle, People soft,etc.) products, because these are totally integrated and help to enforce the reengineering process, by concentrating on the software implementation process. Chief Information Officers want to complete (Business Reengineering) projects in a short period of time because they know how fast the business is changing.

 

FUTURE ROLE OF IT IN REENGINEERING:

            With IT advancing at a rapid pace everyday, the future role of IT in reengineering becomes more critical.

 

Participation should be as a member of the reengineering team; individual should not take control of the project. Technology solutions should be defined to enable new business processes, and time should be taken out to educate operational managers about new technology. Technology needed to support the new business processes should be implemented expectations need to be set and deliverables defined clearly.