week 5 & 6 - Basic of BPR - 4th post

Source / Reference:
1) TQM >> Projects
http://www.tqm.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=55:project-3&catid=40:projects&Itemid=64

2) BPR-PPT, Lisa Baker
 www.docstoc.com/docs/303870/BPR-PPT

3) About Total Quality Management, Loraine Alkire
 http://www.ehow.com/about_4740144_total-quality-management.html

4)  Theories of Total Quality Management, David Carnes
http://www.ehow.com/info_8713566_theories-total-quality-management.html


Subject:
Distinguishes BPR and TQM
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Response:

I think this lecture gives me a more clear view of BPR by comparing with a similar management concept, Total Quality Management (TQM), which is a management concept I learned before.  TQM can be considered as a refinement of BPR. However, it is not necessary that a firm adopts TQM must have gone through BPR.

What is the difference between TQM and BPR? What the lecture notes listed are as follows:

	BPR	TQM
Size of change	Radical, Revolution	Incremental, Evolution
Execution approach	Top-down	Bottom-up
Frequency/Timeliness	One-short, once-for-all	Continuous
IT	IT based	Not necessarily IT based

After reading some articles and visiting some websites, I found there are some more differences. 

TQM focuses more on the quality, rather than cutting cost. According to David Carnes (Source 4), TQM means the companies designing motivation measures and management strategies to improve quality of service and products. It has limited scope of change that it changes the rules and human resources management strategies within a unit. It attempts to enhance the staff’s quality. Upgrading project of Sugar Ray Xulu Stadium (training venue) in Clermont is one the examples of adopting TQM (see Source 1). The company conducting the project states that the TQM project has made effort to improve staff's quality.

For BPR, it changes the procedures, working progress, production flow. It has a more holistic change to the firm. It uses a horizontal view to review and examine the responsibility to be re-allocated, in order to increase productivity. BPR is to re-engineer, re-design and re-formulate the business processes, by altering properties of business processes. It is to maximize values generated by business processes and properties of business processes.

Properties of business processes include:

•  Customer-facing
•  Cross-functional, cross-departmental, and cross enterprise
•  Hand-offs
•  Information flow around the process
•  Knowledge is created around the process
•  Multiple versions rather than one size fits all
•  Value adding mix for most/all of the processes
•  Degree of structure of a process

Work of BPR includes restructuring and enhancement to support front-line, while TQM usually puts more effort in front-line or a particular unit. BPR changes “processes”, not functions or tasks.

As TQM involves motivation, it is much more related to the managerial matters. How the managers lead, coordinate and control the staff and morale is vital to the success of TQM. For BPR, the design of business processes, or the inventiveness of the new processes flow is dominant to the organization. IT must be the enabler of the change.

Let’s use the BPR in Ford as an example. (see Source 2)

“AS-IS” condition: There are 2 business units receiving and processing information. There are more information and hand-offs between different units.

“TO-BE” condition: There is application of IT for the database to centralize all the data. There are fewer hand-offs between units. Fewer staffs are required to perform tasks.

In the transformation from “AS-IS” to “TO-BE”, Ford had not applied motivation tactics or alter the leading roles. Units still have the same functions as they were used to have. But the information flow around the processes is entirely different. It means the firm had rearranged the business flow (BPR), but not the task or goals of the working units (TQM).

To conclude, TQM mainly aims at enhancing quality of output/services, while BPR aims at  reducing redundancy by influencing the organization in a broader sense.
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Comment on Eleanor's 2nd post:
http://eleanorlyy-1230.blogspot.com/2012/02/week-6-business-process-reengineering.html
I think she has explained the importance of IT in BPR well. I understand that the use of IT helps process information, which leads to better knowledge management. The re-organization of the development of first wave BPR helps me to understand history of BPR more.