Hajo Reijers

25 April 2002

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Information systems Information systems

developmentdevelopment

within a BPR contextwithin a BPR context

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Business Process Reengineering?

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Business process

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Examples of business processes

• municipality: issuing of construction permits

• bank: handling applications for mortgages

• central government: delivering fines for traffic

violations

• insurance company: dealing with damage claims

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Examples of business processes

• municipality: issuing of construction permits

tasks? people? information systems?

• bank: handling applications for mortgages

tasks? people? information systems?

• central government: delivering fines for traffic

violations

tasks? people? information systems?

• insurance company: dealing with damage claims

tasks? people? information systems?

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Existing business processes

• Complex structures

not transparant: badly controllable, fault

intolerant

• System proliferation

overlap, difficult information exchange,

uncomfortable, bad maintainability,

• Inflexible structure

change = pulling a house of cards ?

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Business Process Reengineering

Hammer & Champy: “Reengineering the Corporation” (1993):

“fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business

processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical

measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and

speed”

Organize before automation

Process thinking

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Major ingredients BPR

• Restructuring the business process

• Applying information technology

• Examples:

– ING Bank: BPR in 2000 of credit application

business process

– GAK agency: BPR in 1999 of claims handling

business process

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The process ingredient of BPR - example

•More parallelism leads to improved

performance: reduction of waiting times and

better use of capacity.

• Two types of parallelism: semi and real

parallelism.A B

A

B

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The IT ingredient of BPR

•DBMS, sharing of data:

– An electronic document is everywhere and nowhere!

• Network technology:

– communication: e-mail, WWW, ...

– distribution of information: transportation of data is fast,

cheap and convenient

• Automation of tasks or automated support of tasks

Examples:

customer involvement (sending forms via the WWW)

from synchronous to asynchronous communication

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Who is involved in a BPR project?

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Who is involved in a BPR project?• Business professionals

• Management

• Customers

• Consultants

• Information analysts

• IT developers and integrators

• IT vendors

• Employees council

• Product development specialists

• Financial specialists

• Accountant

• Marketing and Public relations

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Approach

You are the leader of a project team with the

mission to reengineer the intake process of patients

at an outpatient clinic (‘polikliniek’)

Where to start?

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Typical pitfalls

• People within organisation do not understand technology

• Requirements are difficult to obtain

• No time for thorough analysis, but:

– errors during the programming, testing, and

maintenance phases are respectively 3, 10 and 100

times more costly than finding it during the design

[J. [Martin. Rapid Application Development. MacMillan,

New York, 1991.]

• Mix of existing systems (‘legacy’) and new systems to buy

and/or build

• Prediction of BPR effects ?

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Conclusion

• BPR is extremely important to achieve improved

business performance

• IT is extremely important in implementing BPR

• You are trained to become an IT expert

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Conclusion

• BPR is extremely important to achieve improved

business performance

• IT is extremely important in implementing BPR

• You are trained to become an IT expert

• So: YOU are important

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Desk workFamous book and enjoyable to read:

– M. Hammer and J. Champy. Reengineering the Corporation; A

Manifesto for Business Revolution. Harper Business, New York,

1993.

BPR overview, contains many pointers:

– P. O’Neill, A.S. Sohal. Business Process Reengineering: a

Review of Recent Literature. Technovation 19(9): 571-581,

1999.

Good article (ahem):

– W.M.P. van der Aalst, H.A. Reijers and S. Limam. Product-

driven Workflow Design. In W. Shen et al., editors, Proceedings

of the Sixth International Conference on Computer Supported

Cooperative Work in Design 2001, 397-402. NRC Research

Press, Ottawa, 2001.