Business process reengineering and organizational performance: An exploration of issues

It has been nearly seven years since the term BPR came into existence. Its innovative approach to change management and resulting successes and its ov erextension and misuse and the resulting dissatisfaction have raised many q uestions. This paper provides an empirical validation of some of the sugges tions and prescriptions in the BPR 'critical success factors/pitfall litera ture, through a content analysis of the annual reports of many companies th at have reported successful reengineering projects. The results of this ana lysis suggest that many companies were not implementing BPR alone, but as o ne of the component of a set of change approaches that include strategic re thinking of business direction and less radical process improvement. This s uggests that, at the organizational level, BPR should not be evaluated alon e but as a part of a 'strategic change set'. This paper also presents an ex ploratory longitudinal analysis of firm performance measures to see the val ue created by BPR to organizations. The main idea was to see the effect of process change on productivity measures like sales by employees and financi al performance measures like revenue growth; The findings from this analysi s show that process change seems to be correlated with the productivity mea sure sales by employees, but its effect on the other financial performance measures is not evident. This suggests the need for organizations to focus more deliberately an the effect of process change on these measures, and in tegrate BPR with other change approaches and move towards a continuous chan ge paradigm. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.