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Re-engineering The CorporationA Manifesto for Business Revolution
• Adam Smith and Henry Ford taught the value of specialization and decomposition of work into its elements: tasks. Linear flows and lack of variety ("any color so long as it is black", Ford said about the Model T which sold for $500) were the reason for its success.
• Today variety is the consumer's right, work processes are far from linear, and organizations have become very large. There is gridlock. Time to re-unify the tasks and make them into coherent processes, and mange the processes instead of the tasks.
• Re-engineering is not about fixing anything. It is about abolishing and starting afresh.
• Use today's technology and today's market needs to organize the work. Forget the old titles and responsibilities and departments.
• The governing philosophies and unconscious (or conscious) rules may all have been rendered obsolete.
Think Discontinuously is the message.Think Discontinuously is the message.
• Have to look across and beyond functional departments, to processes: therefore needs to have a very high level mandate. Cannot be done as a bottom-up self-improvement or continuous improvement -- though there is a place for that.
• Why did these companies adopt radical change instead of incremental change?.
• These companies used a common set of tools and tactics.• They asked "Why do we do what we do?", not "Can we do
what we are doing better, faster, or cheaper.• Many tasks were being done to satisfy internal rules, not to
provide value to the customer.
To survive, every corporation has to re-invent its processes periodically.-- to adjust to the inevitable change in its environment (which could have been caused by its own actions).
To survive, every corporation has to re-invent its processes periodically.-- to adjust to the inevitable change in its environment (which could have been caused by its own actions).
The Crisis• Parts of a company optimize at the expense of the whole.• There is no one or department in charge in charge of getting
the work done which needs spans departments, e.g., no VP of Order Fulfillment or Returns or ... But returns may involve 13 departments (receiving, warehouse, inventory management, sales, accounting, commissions, etc.)
• Ex. of how long it take to do field testing of a drug. Lots of wait time, recycle time for error. Took 2 years to get a 1 week follow up study on 30 patients.
• Growing bureaucracy and middle management -- an overhead that does not scale, it grows disproportionately.
• Customers have choice and want service, variety, flexibility, and get information (like Consumer Reports).
• Competitors are global; they do not play by your rules or suffer from your economic situation or cost structures. Start-ups everywhere change the rules, they do not imitate what is around.
No management principle will fix the problem of decline till the key processes are re-built for today's demand.
No management principle will fix the problem of decline till the key processes are re-built for today's demand.
Bureaucracy is the glue that makes the current fragmented tasks come together to produce a result. You need it so long as the tasks remain fragmented and do not become a business process.
Bureaucracy is the glue that makes the current fragmented tasks come together to produce a result. You need it so long as the tasks remain fragmented and do not become a business process.
• Take nothing for granted, consider even that the existing process may be unnecessary, and wholly new needs may be present.
• Do not foreclose new processes because they will entail a change in the responsibility or power structure or organization.
• Re-engineering focuses on redesigning a fundamental business process, not on departments.
Once a real work process is re-engineered, the shape of the organizational structure required to perform it will become apparent.
Examples of Re-engineering• IBM Credit Corp Managers walked through an actual credit
approval request and found it took 90 minutes of work and 7 days of wait time. Solution: replaced a host of specialists by single generalist who did the whole process which took 4 specialists. No hand-offs.
• Ford Motor decided to pay on receipt of goods, after a check against the P.O. which is available on-line. No vendor invoice is needed. Reduced 500 person AP department to 125 person Procurement department. Elsewhere Ford pays when they use the vendor's brakes.
• Kodak did CE to speed up the development of a 35mm single-use camera in response to Fuji. Engineers in all departments worked simultaneously instead of sequentially, but shared changes every day and resolved conflicts. Cut 70 weeks to 38 weeks. And involvement of tooling designer early has made the design more inexpensive to manufacture by 25%.
Reengineering means doing more with less. Reengineering means doing more with less.
• Reduce checks and controls. Replace transaction-by- transaction controls with aggregated controls, done at deferred time. Tolerate possibility of limited fraud.
• Minimize reconciliation (number of checks on something before it happens).
• Provide single contact case manager with responsibility to the customer to shield him/her form internal complexity.
• Exploit information technology to share information across boundaries. But do not automate old processes. You may make them harder to change, and the damage they do may be magnified.
• Combine the freedom, flexibility, and focus that comes from de-centralization, with the advantages that go with centralization (shared information, uniform procedures, etc.)
• Business process re-engineering will cause other changes:
in values, in metrics, in activity focus and even in the organization structure itself.
1 Work units change from departments --> Process Teams.
Process teams do not contain representatives from all the other departments involved. Rather, process teams replace all the
departments involved. The team may have one person re-trained to handle several aspects, or be composed of many people. The team may be permanent (recurring work) or be episodic (product development)
2 Jobs change from simple tasks to multi-dimensional work.
Specialized repetitive assembly-line work is transformed into work that needs an understanding of the whole process and focus on getting to the point where value si delivered to your customer. An individual's work will be influenced by its cross-dependency with other people's work. Interface hand-off checking and controls are reduced and more of the time is spent adding real value.
The challenge is that the work requires smarter people.
3 People's roles change -- from controlled to empowered.
No longer is it enough to have people who just follow the rules. People need to work in a self-directed manner, adhering to previously accepted goals fo quality, deadlines etc. But they solve the problems themselves, not by responding to supervisory checks on them -- which waste time, anyway. Taking initiative, having self-discipline, and so on become the valued traits of an employee.
4 Job preparation changes from training to education.
Training is to follow a procedure (the what). Trained people fill a slot.
Education is to think and understand the job (the why). There is only a rough slot and it will keep changing. The emphasis is on the ability to learn and re-learn.
5 Performance measures and compensation shifts from activity to results.
Because a process creates a product or service with value to the company, you can compensate teams of people on that basis, rather than for time spent, or pieces of paper handled, or joints soldered, or some such tasks.
Reward systems turn away from years spent in company, or seniority, and so on to contribution and performance. Base salaries may be low, but bonuses for performance are high.
6 Advancement criteria change, form performance to ability.
Pay for performance, and promote for ability demonstrated to grow into a new position.
7 Values change from protective to productive.
Do people behave as though the customers paid their salaries, or their boss paid their salaries? It is not enough to preach customer values, if the management systems then subvert them. At Xerox the warring among departments to fix blame stopped when managers' bonuses got tied to a measure of customer satisfaction.
Do people believe they fail or succeed as a team?
8 Managers change from supervisors to coaches.
Traditional bosses: allocate work, supervise, monitor, control, check work as it moves. All this is done by teams themselves. No job here for managers.
But teams need coaches, need people to ask for advice or solve problems.
The characteristics of a manager are different from those of a worker, because the former has to take pride in the the accomplishment of others.
9 Organizational structures change from hierarchical to flat.
Many of the decisions that required managerial meetings for communication and coordination of work, now get done by the teams themselves. It does not take that much managerial effort as it once required to put the fragmented tasks together again. Instead of departmental hierarchies, you now have strategic business units. A manager can control only ~7 persons, but he can coach 4 times as many.
10 Executives change from scorekeepers to leaders.
With re-engineered processes the team is doing the work and the higher ups are brought closer to the customer. The executive do not control the processes, but they do have responsibility to engineer and see to it that the processes are working and are the right ones. They cannot just say: make 15% profit or I will be very angry with you; they have to get in closer to the real work and lead.
• Using IT to speed up an existing process gives some advantage. But using it imaginatively to do something never thought possible before can cause vast improvements to occur.
• Entirely new classes of applications can result from new technology. The new technology is not meant just to do the same thing faster, but to create new needs (Say's Law in economics, supply creates its own demand). Alan Kay: "An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it". It is no use doing market research on a technology which consumers are unable to conceptualize. (e.g. Sony Walkman).
It is the disruptive power of technology, its ability to break the rules which limit how we conduct our work, that makes it critical to companies looking for competitive advantage.
It is the disruptive power of technology, its ability to break the rules which limit how we conduct our work, that makes it critical to companies looking for competitive advantage.
Old rule: Field personnel need offices.Disruptive technology: Portable computers and wireless comm.New rule: Field personnel can send and receive information
wherever they are.
Old rule: The best contact with a potential buyer is personal contact.
Disruptive technology: Interactive Videodisk.New rule: The best contact with a potential buyer is effective
contact.
Old rule: You have to find out where things are..Disruptive technology: Automatic identification and tracking
technology.New rule: Things tell you where they are.
Old rule: Plans get reviewed periodically.Disruptive technology: High performance computing.New rule: Plans get revised instantaneously.
• The potential of technology to move a company ahead dramatically has to be ongoing. In this way novel and unexpected uses of technology can gain large advantages. Imagination is needed.
• Watch for technologies that are just demonstrable today. Prepare internally to use them (conceptualize, evaluate, prepare people, plan deployment) and then you can be 3 years ahead when the technology actually arrives.
It is the disruptive power of technology, its ability to break the rules that limit how we conduct our work, that makes it critical to companies looking for competitive advantage.
It is the disruptive power of technology, its ability to break the rules that limit how we conduct our work, that makes it critical to companies looking for competitive advantage.
• Org charts are well-drawn and visible. So are departments. But what we re-engineer are the processes that go on to accomplish a company's business, not the departments.
• We need to create process maps for the processes and name them in a way that shows the stat end end events.
• At a high level hardly any company needs more than 10 processes to do its work. For example, TI had 6: Strategy Dev, Product Dev, Customer Design and Support, Order Fulfillment, Mfg Capability Dev,and Customer Communications.
• Note that the Customer is right there in the middle as is not the case in an org chart, and so are prospects.
• If these processes are exploded you get sub-processes, again numbering no more than half a dozen per process, and there you will see who all are involved from which departments. The departments are not eliminated, they are just welded into the process maps and you will see where the important lines of communication between departments have to be installed.
Process maps should only take weeks to constructProcess maps should only take weeks to construct
Which Processes to Re-engineer?• Cannot do all the high-level processes simultaneously.
Select acc to :
¦ Broken: is the process in deep trouble?
¦ Importance: impact on the company.
¦ Feasibility
Broken Processes
Symptom: Excessive information interchange, particularly control information, and redundant data exchange and re-keying, etc.
Disease: Arbitrary fragmentation of a process.
If lots of messages are flying about, the solution is not necessarily to add more communication lines. People should be calling each other less. It may be there is not enough devolution of decision making. Or what they are doing may be so closely linked that it should be handled by one person, or one case team.
Well-designed natural organizational units should send finished products to one another. Such units should have a thin pipeline connecting them to the rest of the world.
Well-designed natural organizational units should send finished products to one another. Such units should have a thin pipeline connecting them to the rest of the world.
Disease: Uncertainty in supply, unpredictability of demand.
Solution Don't try to control inventory with elaborate inventory management schemes. Get rid of it. Plan. Manage the uncertainty. Work with suppliers, customers.
Symptom: High ratio of work checkers, expediters and managers, to work doers.
Disease: Fragmentation of work. Lack of inculcation of pride and taking responsibility for work.
Solution Internal checks may be necessary for auditing and control, but it should not become a governing principle. When it comes to non-finance-oriented work, let the workers do their own checking, perhaps in teams, let them police the standards they are to attain, and build that into the process.
Disease: (1) Lack of inter-communication throughout work process to keep everyone informed; or (2) tools and equipment and technique not refined enough for what is being attempted.
Solution (1) Work as a process team responsible for end product or service and communicate continuously during work.(2) Invest effort in development or acquisition of tools to bring process "in control".
Symptom: Too many special cases and exceptions, and therefore process complexity to deal with it.
Disease: Originally simple process has been patched over and over again.
Solution Restore simplicity by creating several simple processes and deciding at the input which of several processes to use. One standard process with complex decision points all along its length is confusing and difficult and error-prone.
• Step back and understand the current process at a high level. Do not go into gory analytic detail.
• Look from the output end and question is this the output that is desired by the customer, or can the customer ask for something more advantageous to his need?
• Look for simple, inexpensive, changes that look at the output from another standpoint and come up with different rules.
• Customers always ask for the same thing a little better or faster or more, in other words incremental change. But re-engineering is about dramatic change.
• Old processes can take only so much fixing before the marginal benefits are not worth the bother.
• Get into the work environment and find out by watching. Do not sit in the office and interview. Get to understand the business. It is a source of ideas.
• Having figured out what should be the real objective of the process, learn just enough about the current process to to understand its what and why and basic assumptions -- it is not necessary to know its how because you are going to re-design it.
Consider the customer's underlying goals and problems, not just the mechanics of the process that links the two organizations.
Consider the customer's underlying goals and problems, not just the mechanics of the process that links the two organizations.
• Redesign suspends existing rules and values, and allows imagination free play. It is not a formal deductive algorithm at work.
• But there are some precedents which will help
• First get a representative team together that has the charter to look into and improve some facet of the company's business that is having problems
• State the problems. Then in a 5 to 10 minute session have a team leader present the process undergone (in prose or in an annotated diagram). Get the team to refine it in case there are any disagreements.
• Begin brainstorming on the process.¦ Who are the people who make various decisions or
contribute information or do some work? ¦ How long does it take at each station for a typical unit of
work to flow? ¦ What iteration might be necessary? ¦ Whether there is a categorization of the work which might be
relevant to deciding if a single process should be replaced bb several processes treated differently? An 80-20 rule could operate right at the start.
¦ Does the customer get exactly what his real need is without further work, or does the customer have to do more after he gets the service or product from you?
¦ Are the decisions taken as early as possible, or do you take much additional time for checking?
¦ Could the decision taken now at one point in the flow be done at an earlier point, simple by changing the responsibility, or assigning trust to an earlier person in the flow, and doing aggregated checking later?
¦ How many information systems are involved in delivering the service?
• Continue brainstorming on the process. Come up with big ideas.¦ Can one devise incentives for eliminating fraud or reducing
exposure when the decision is to be taken without checking?¦ What is the time penalty of delay for the organization? What
happens in the customer's mind when there is time delay?¦ Can you simplify things for the customer to notify you or
contact you when he needs a service or product?¦ Are there some unconscious rules or assumptions at work in
deciding at which point the service or decision is completed? Can that rule be broken?
¦ Can two actions which are sequential today, be done in parallel? Can the result that will be known only at the end of the first task taken into account later, after the customer has been served?
¦ If there is work being done to take care of the problem is the customer made aware of that fact, and when s/he can expect the completion?
¦ Is the customer having to deal with a lot of different people to get his work done or can he be kept insulated form the internal intricacies of a company's working?
• Involve as few people as possible in the performance of a process, if possible a single person with some help of technology. Minimize the number of hand-offs.
• Identify and annihilate assumptions.
• Harness information technology.
Some lessons from experience:
¦ You don't have to be an expert to redesign a process.
¦ Being an outsider helps
¦ Discard pre-conceived notions.
¦ See things through the customer's eyes.
¦ Redesign is best done in teams.
¦ You don't need to know much about the current process.
Bell Atlantic Carrier Access Service Re-engineering
• In the next step the case team to deliver the CAS service will be replaced by one case worker plus some new technology.
• One worker will take the customer request and from his/her terminal will make all the electronic connections necessary to complete the request.
• After doing the connection s/he will do all the work needed to bill and keep records.
• In a later step the customer will be able to interface directly to the Bell Atlantic CAS system and have their request done without intervention of a BA worker at all. Self-provisioning!
Zero cycle time will be achieved in 3 steps, and there will be great reduction in cost, increase in customer satisfaction and elimination of errors .
Zero cycle time will be achieved in 3 steps, and there will be great reduction in cost, increase in customer satisfaction and elimination of errors .
Growth in productivity is at the cost of unemployment, as the recent US phenomenon of "jobless growth " demonstrates.
• If you need more generalists, how come we train specialists only (e.g. in medicine where specialists constitute 75% of medical students graduating in USA)?
A follow-up to the enormously popular book "Reengineering the Corporation," the new book "Reengineering Management" (by one of the first book's co-authors) offers a less aggressive plan for management action. Instead of the tough-guy approach of the first book, James Champy proposes a "new mindfulness" characterized by trust, integrity, imagination, and a cooperative spirit. The book's wisdom in a nutshell: The purpose of a business is
1) to serve customers,
2) do useful and meaningful work,
3) create an organizational culture that serves people's needs,
4) act in a "mentoring, participative" manner rather than an autocratic one, and
5) have employees who can work as a team and communicate with people. Champy admits that the reengineering movement has not fulfilled its promise, and blames this failure on managers who continue to operate with obsolete thinking. (James Champy, "Reengineering Management," Harper Business, 1995)