SEMESTER SEPTEMBER 2014 JANUARY 2015

INTRODUCTION
The concept of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is to rethink and breakdown
existing business process. This allows a company to reduce cost and improve productivity
through newer, more efficient process. It is important to remember however, though there are
instances where these is necessary, BPR is not without its disadvantage. This makes it vital to
weight your decision carefully. One of the most obvious adverse effects of a companys
decision to reengineer is lowered employee morale. Most people are vary of changes and do
not manage to adapt to it easily. These aspect need to keep in mind when trying to make
decision to go through with the activity.

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DEFINITION BUSINESS REENGINEERING PROCESS (BPR)

AND CONTINUOUS PROCESS IMPROVEMENT (CPI)
According to Hammer and Champy, BPR is the fundamental rethink and radical
redesign of business process to achieve dramatic improvement in performance such as cost,
quality, service, speed etc.
In BPR the organization need to go back to the basic and re-examine their roots. It
doesnt believe in small improvement rather it aims at total reinvention. BPR focus more on
process and not on task, job or people. For example, we do not redesign personnel but we
redesign the hiring process.
The entire technological human and organization unit maybe change in BPR. It is
important to us to understand that a significant business process can involve multiple
organizational units. When we doing BPR it not only affects the process but also affect the
people completing the process, the skill factor required and the organizational procedure for
managing those people. In BPR when we change the process, we will also change the culture
of our organization.
CPI seeks incremental improvement that is not drastic. CPI takes a long term
incremental approach when in cooperating CPI. The goal of CPI is to improve business
process by introduce some moderate changes that are generally incremental in nature. In
order to improve efficiency and effectiveness in CPI, employees involve in process to look
ways to incrementally improve it.
These means making moderate changes to the ways the company operates its business
to take advantage of new opportunities offered by technology or copy the competitor is doing
in order to improve the efficiency and effectiveness.

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STEP TO ENSURE SUCCESFUL IMPLEMENTATION BPR

PREPARE FOR REENGINEERING
Company must recognise the need of BPR. It is necessary to perform BPR. The company has
to decide whether to reengineer or not. BPR activity needs to begin with a clearly define and
measureable objective. Whether the goal is reducing cost, improving quality of product or
increasing efficiency, the framework for what need to be achieve has to be decided and in
line with the company vision and mission. Another important factor to be considered is to
understand the customer expectation where the existing process fails to meet those
requirements. In other word, the company should identify the process that are strategic and
have value to customer.
ASSESMENT
In this stage, company identify the main problem an obtain detail understanding of the
process. It involves an understanding of the process structure in term of cost, timing and how
it flow within organizations. All process need to be studied and those seen as slacking or that
can be improve need to be identify and this process should not clash with company vision and
mission. In order to get detail understanding, the fact gathering technique can be used such as
interview user and do observation. The scope of the selected process for the reengineering
process needs to be clearly defined.
SOLUTION
During this stage, the BPR process now moves from concept or idea to details system also
known as physical system design. The senior management take responsibility for
implementing the objective of the BPR by empowering the reengineering team.
BENCHMARKING
The focus of this stage is to find different approach to manage a process. By having
benchmarking together with experience and expertise of team members help to introduce a
creative approach to manage the process.

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DEVELOPMENT OF THE PROCESS AND TESTING

People, process and technology are integrated at this point. Under this stage, the process are
actually being develop and being tested. For example, before the product is launch a
prototype is tested out if the result is positive the company should launch the product.
However, if the result is negative the company shouldnt launch the product and take a
corrective action to ratify the problem of the product.
IMPLEMENT SYSTEM
After the process being develop, the user should be provided with a working system that will
describe how user will use the new process. After the process is completed and being
implement for certain period of time a post implementation review is perform in order to
evaluate the new system whether it meet the goal set for it.

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ADVANTAGE AND DISADVANTAGE OF BPR

It is important to acknowledge and understand that BPR is not a foolproof method of
success. As with all activities it runs the risk of failure.
There are several advantages of BPR that are customer needs are made the priority
and this vision is use to appropriately direct business practices. Besides that, there a cost
advantages to be achieve that help the organizations become more competitive in its
industries. A strategic view of all operational process is taken with relevant question being
ask about the establish way of work and how it can be developed over the long term into
more efficient business practices. Furthermore there is willingness to look beyond task and
traditional functional boundaries with force outcomes. Through this, entire processes can be
eliminated or amalgamated into fewer but more relevant and powerful processes throughout
the organization. There is real desire to simplify the way of work by objectively accessing all
activities and task and eliminating any that act less value and more complexity.
BPR does not always success its also have disadvantages that are it is seem as a
way to make minor adjustment and improvement to existing process. If there is no clear
willingness to put all existing process onto the chopping block, there is no change of success.
It is also a one-time cost cutting exercise. In reality, cost reduction is often a handy by
product of the activity but not the primary consent. It is also not a one-time activity but an
ongoing change in mind set. There is no success in gaining dedicated long term commitment
from management and the employees. Bringing people onboard is a difficult task and many
BPR initiatives never take off because enough effort is not put into securing support.
Furthermore one department is prioritized at the expanse of the process. There needs to be an
openness towards studying every single process in detail and a willingness to change whether
is needed to achieve overall efficiency. There is too much internal focus and not enough of an
eye on the industry and what competitors best practices can be use as benchmark.

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DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BPR AND CPI

Business process improvement means making moderate change to the way in which
the organization operates to take advantage of new opportunities offered by the technology or
to copy what competitors are doing. It also can improve efficiency and improve effectiveness
as well. Meanwhile, BPR is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business
process to achieve dramatic improvement in performance such as cost, quality, service and
speed.
In term of management involvement, CPI involve employee at all level and
emphasises continuous improvement of work processes whereas BPR involve managers in a
hands-on role. This is because BPR often lead to changes in organizational structure and
redesign of job. In the CPI team members, are involved on an as needed basis over an
extended time frame. Involvement of team members is more intense in case of BPR. It is
often on a regular basis over a shorter time frame.
Under CPI successive incremental improvement are achieve over a period of time,
starting from how a work process operate currently and improving upon it. BPR is done
periodically and it focus is on achieving dramatic improvement. It involve radically
redesigning how a process operates without being restricted by how thing were being done
earlier.
The incremental improvements made in CPI add up to significant overall
improvement for a firm. BPR focus on outcome and on achieving breakthrough improvement
at one time unlike CPI. In CPI the focus is usually on narrowly define process. These often
involve employees working to improve a sub process which is part of a higher level process.
BPR need to focus on broad-based cross-functional process which span the major part of an
entire organizational system.
Organizations using only CPI occasionally prevent themselves by redesigning a
form, creating a new piece of correspondence etc. With BPR, information systems
technology often helps to achieve radical improvement in cycle-time reduction, information
access and elimination of paper trail. Organization that value improvement should encourage
or even mandate their employees input on improvement opportunities. Employees should
look at every process with scope for improvement in their mind.

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CONCLUSION
BPR is a radical change activity that cannot be repeated if it goes wrong the first
time. It is often a high risk activity that involves monetary investment and a risk of
demotivated employee. It is essential to have buy in all the way from management down and
it should have a broad functional scope.
Successful BPR can potentially create substantial improvements in the way
organizations do business and can actually produce fundamental improvements for business
operation. However, in order to achieve that there are some key success factors that must be
taken into consideration when performing BPR. Organization planning to undertake BPR
must taken into consideration the success factors of BPR in order to ensure that their
reengineering related change efforts are comprehensive, well implemented, and have
minimum chance of failure,
CPI is a great ways for the company to identify opportunity and integrate
improvement into the day-to-day working of the company. Once CPI has become second
nature within the organizational culture your team will begin to find opportunity in the most
unexpected places, creative an environment that nurtures innovation and fosters a sense of
ownership and pride among individuals.

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REFERENCES
Khashiah Yusof (2009), Analysis and Design for accounting students, 3rd edition, pg
74 77, Mc Graw Hill Education
Kim Langfield (2012), Management Accounting, 6th Edition, pg 744 745, Mc Graw
Hill Education.
http://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/different-between-continous-improvement-andprocess-reengineering/21131
http://www.entrepreneurial-insights.com/business-competitives-business-processreengineering-bpr/
Criatiana Bogdanoui (2012), Business process reengineering method versus kaizen
method, Faculty of financial Accounting Management Craiova, Romania
J. Chris White (2014), Reengineering and Continuous Improvement, Retrieved from
www.qualitydigest.com

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