The two models for to be considered and discussed in this section are the Business Process Re-engineering and Kaizen models.
Business Process Re-engineering
Definition
The world today is ever changing, moving from one phase to the other and the only thing that does not change is ‘change’ itself. As the modern business environment is propelled by the three Cs namely Customer, Competition and Change, organisations are always looking for new business innovations to salvage their ailing enterprise. (Hammer and Champy, 1993) One of such solutions that have been identified and used by many companies is the Business Process Re-engineering or shortened as BPR.
There is no one definition of BPR. Many writers have attempted to describe what a BPR is and some of these would be considered. The main proponents of BPR, Hammer and Champy (1993) defined it as “the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and speed."
Davenport (1992), in describing BPR says it “encompasses the envisioning of new work strategies, the actual process design activity, and the implementation of the change in all its complex technological, human, and organizational dimensions”. In other words, BPR involves the reorganisation of the main processes in a business enterprise to remove those elements that do not contribute to the company’s main objectives.(Senior, 2002:109) Its aim is “to achieve a radical rethinking and redesign of organisational processes in order to significantly improve key performance measures, such as quality, cost and delivery.”(Burnes, 2004:596)
BPR has been acclaimed as “the biggest business innovation of the 1990s” (Mill, 1994:26) as it is about the improvement of productivity by considering the whole process as opposed to just specific activities or functions.