BPR MAJU

MAJU

Business Process Re-Engineering

Chapter-10: Hallmark Re-Engineering

Student Name: Syed Ali Adeel Rizvi (MBA)

Student ID : SP07-MM-0137
Concept by : Dr. Rehan

Created By Adeel Rizvi MAJU

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Summary the reengineering experience of Hallmark and what were the

challenges faced

HALLMARK CARDS INC.

The transformation at Hallmark was another top-down initiative designed to create a new
competitive edge in the face of fragmenting markets, expanding channels of retail
distribution, and smaller average print runs, all leading to fundamental changes in the
economics of Hallmark's business. The project was driven by a "quantum vision" of
achieving radical transformation in the way the company did business, but again,
unfolded in a step-like way.

The first step was to get the company's 40 senior executives "on board" through an off
site meeting. From there the company proceeded to create a broader context for change
by getting the chairman, Donald Hall, to articulate the company's "beliefs and guiding
values" for communication to employees generally. A clear set of business priorities was
also set, emphasizing the importance of getting new products to market in less than a
year; producing products and promotional programs that consistently won over both
buyers and retailers; and reducing costs with continued improvements in quality. As
Robert Stark, President of the core business unit puts it, "It all boiled down to
dramatically improving performance at the retail level" through Hallmark's specialty
stores and other distribution outlets.

Against this background the company embarked on what Stark calls "The Journey." They
sought , in his words, "to demonstrate the viability of some of (the) concepts and come
out with significant wins. That required picking our pilot projects carefully. They had to
be believable and reproducible in another area of the organization. The improvement had
to be order-of-magnitude - something you couldn't get from continuous improvement, for
example."

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As in the other cases the whole change was driven by pilots and prototypes that brought
the challenges down to a manageable size. For example, they grouped one hundred
people into nine teams to address what Stark calls a series of "leverage points" - the
critical parts of the business that needed to change. From over a hundred
recommendations for design improvements, a dozen were selected for validation in a
series of pilot projects. As a result of the experience critical improvements were made,
for example, around the use of new technology. Specific understandings of how new
technology could improve the business came through the experiments. As Stark reports,
there was a faith in the idea that new technology could improve the business, but the
details had to emerge and be refined through practice.

For example, an initiative designed to create instantaneous market information led to a

number of stores being outfitted with computerized point-of-sale information systems.
Decision support systems were then produced, allowing fine-grained real-time analysis of
what was selling and what wasn't, using experiments with in-store layout, promotion and
advertising to determine effectiveness on the basis of immediate feedback.

In another situation, pilot experiments in relation to the product-development cycle for a

new line of cards allowed the time to market to be reduced from an average of two to
three years to less than a year. Over half the line hit the stores within eight months. The
breakthrough was achieved by prototyping a system whereby the development process
broke the boundaries between traditional departments and functions by using integrated
teams that could communicate and act creatively in a more direct way.

Hallmark provides an exemplar of the reengineering process and of how it is possible to

achieve quantum change. But the change is not achieved at a stroke. It unfolds in what we
are calling a 15% way, taking a course that could never have been clearly anticipated at
the start.

Created By Adeel Rizvi MAJU

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