Reengineering Principles

The standard Reengineering principles are as follows –

1. Organize work around its end results, not tasks

According to this principle, it is optimal to determine the work’s end result rather than dividing the work into small tasks & units. We try to rearrange the work process so that a single person can perform all the steps involved. This eliminates wastage of time due to trailing of work processes through many hands and also puts workers in control of processes. Organizing work around end results reduces the number of intermediate levels of approvals and assign a single concerned personnel to perform all the tasks.

2. Capture data only once when it is first created

According to this principle, the company shall capture & store data only one time when it is first created. In other words, the should avoid redundant data. The company should avoid accepting the same data via input forms that has already being entered in the enterprise database. The use of IT enabled systems such the EDI systems, OLT systems DSS, data warehousing systems EIS etc will help to setup the appropriate information management system for the enterprise that deals with data consistency, integrity, correctness and avoiding data redundancy.

3. Allow decision points where work is performed

In usual work setups, the processes are completely controlled by the managers and supervisors. This often fasten hierarchical management structures. The actual doers are assumed to lack the knowledge or responsibility o take a process to completion. The reengineered process argues that the people who actually do the work should be the ones to make many of the decisions about it, and that the controls over the decisions should be built into the systems that workers use.

Such an approach to work will reduce layers of organizational bureaucracy and changes the roles of workers and supervisors. It empowers the doers to better control their own work environment.

4. Incorporate controls into information processing

While reengineering a business process, we allow the people who collect the information to process the information too. Such controls are incorporated to the information processing system in such a way that usually a single computer could process and store all the related information of a process. The single computer shall process all the data in seconds and at a single location, thus avoiding the process to stretch along the various functions. Now, the person handling the computer system is responsible for the whole process and usually this change in responsibility is a boon to efficiency. Instead of allowing a discrepancy to pass through to several people within an organization, it can be stopped at the source.

5. Make people who use a process do the work

Over specialized and complex processes brings in bureaucracies and will cause people to spend undue time and energy following company policies and strict functional approaches rather than common sense. Make people who use a process do the work means that the reengineered process lets users get their own supplies and information by building controls into the system. If, for eg:, the accounting department requires some stationary items, it should not have to go to another department to administer the process. Instead, the purchasing group shall setup master accounts in a computer system to deal with any sort of purchasing in any other departments indirectly via distributed computer applications and this allow the accounts department to buy the stationary by itself and get the necessary data updated in the purchasing department’s master account.

6. Work in parallel instead of sequentially and later integrate the results

Reengineered business setup enables multiple work projects to be handled in parallel so that the individual projects are linked & coordinated in such a way that the end product development is accelerated without any breakup in between. Reengineering enabled by IT solutions such as the enterprise wide intranets, CAD/CAM systems, manufacturing automation systems, ERP systems, EDI systems, work group internet works etc, supports this work in parallel and integrate results methodology.

7. Treat geographically dispersed resources as one

According to this reengineering principle, the reengineered system will enable the enterprise to integrate the geographically separated resources (man, machine, money, information) and provide a centralized control over these resources. Consider the case of enterprise’s information management setup in the reengineered system. The enterprise wide intranet integrates the distributed data sources and data stores by allowing data sharing, peer-to-peer communication between data applications and a centralized control over the intranet by the IT department. When we take the case of the workforce, we may integrate the workforce of the enterprise towards the common goal of the enterprise by enabling the workers to interact with each other and with the related process via the intranet.

Shared databases, telecommunication networks and standardized processing systems now make it possible to gain the benefits of scale and centralization while maintaining the advantages of the flexibility and service that come from being dispersed and close to the customer.