Search results

Companies are once again launching large reengineering projects. Will they repeat the mistakes of the reengineering boom of the nineties? Two veterans offer guidance around the pitfalls.

Many of today's major reengineering projects involve the implementation of an ERP – “enterprise resource planning” system that spans processes from finance and accounting to human resource management to supply chain optimization., based on readily available software packages that can run almost all of a company's standard processes. The authors explain how top management can better manage implementation of these systems.

At a company that recently implemented an enterprise resource planning (ERP) initiative that achieved it business goals the CEO advised: put the best people, internal and external, on the program full‐time; establish clear alignment and accountability for target actions and results, top to bottom in the organization; drive a bias for leveraging off‐the‐shelf solutions, not customized technology; and strike the right balance when defining goals and the cost versus benefit plan for the program.

The authors are veterans of scores of mission‐critical enterprise and operations solution implementation projects.

Senior executives are privately crossing their fingers that this round of investment in reengineering will not result in an endless drain on corporate resources. Executives need this checklist for getting beyond IT train wrecks to achieve real business value.

Business process reengineering, which turned from fad to flop a few years ago, has rebounded, and is now utilized by some 61 percent of companies according to a recent survey. Senior executives need a strongly worded reminder not to make the same leadership mistakes that caused so many reengineering failures in the past.

The authors set out strategies which corporate real estate departments can adopt to take full advantage of all available tax benefits in order to minimise their corporation’s tax exposure.

Cites survey evidence that many firms undertaking e‐commerce projects do not appraise or evaluate them in traditional ways and discusses how businesses can deal with the many perspectives involved. Illustrates the “four faces of e‐business”, lists its benefits and considers seven legal/regulatory issues which require review in this context. Identifies three critical success factors for e‐business, shows some international growth forecasts and compares three financing models for e‐services. Briefly describes how some companies deal with security on the internet, sees e‐business as “imperative” for business success and warns that, although no single strategic model fits all companies, a strategy must be developed to avoid reducing returns on investment.

Jim Jarmusch’s feature film Dead Man, apparently a Western, exceeds the genre’s traditional boundaries and shows ambivalence, unclear roles in an environment existing between the times of the nation’s founding and the success of civilisation. It shows a world in transformation where change is happening, not managed. The film is a provocation for adherents to traditional Western movies. But a closer look at this world offers a surprising insight into a dynamic involved in change processes that also occur after mergers or take‐overs in contemporary business organisations. The charm in using the film as a metaphor is at least two‐fold. The interpretation with the help of Lyotard and Baudrillard shows a double edged dynamic where the successful new owner after a take‐over is not necessarily in charge of the game. Beyond that the use of a movie from outside the mainstream offers a non‐mainstream argument inside the core of a mainstream management topic.

This paper seeks to examine the correlations between measures of employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction before and after a major process reengineering initiative.

Data were collected in 130 branches of a large financial services organization using employee and customer surveys.

Scores on some employee satisfaction factors were predictive of customer satisfaction at both time periods. Other employee satisfaction factors were found to have a stronger relationship with customer satisfaction in one period but not both.

This study needs to be replicated to determine the generalizability of the findings.

Work demands which probably increased due to the reengineering initiative were predictive of customer satisfaction following the reengineering effort.

Organizations need to consider the effects of organizational changes in their efforts to provide high quality customer service.

As people work through their daily lives, they interact with a variety of organisations. Some of those interactions are successful, and others are dreadful. And managers of organisations tend to look at their own organisational successes and failures and hope that the successes outnumber the failures. Managers observe that most of the successes come from the highest performing employees, and the failures tend to emanate from the worst performers. So, they try to encourage the worst performers to ‘become better team players’ or ‘be more sensitive to the customer's needs’, and hope that they eventually ‘get it’. Some will, and most will not. And then one day, a manager interacts with an organisation that ‘goes the extra mile’ and provides a great service or product, and he/she fantasises about what it is that makes this organisation successful, while his/hers is marginal at best. The answer to this question is actually quite simple, but to fix the problems can be time consuming and painful. The single quality that highly successful organisations all have in common is that they have an organisational culture which values leadership. They have achieved what few organisations have achieved: they have become a ‘Leadership Organisation’ (an organisation that has leaders at all levels of the organisational chart). Once an organisation has achieved this level of leadership, overall organisational success is easily achievable. This paper is intended to give managers a basic framework on how they can turn their organisations into high‐performing successes. Managers' ability to achieve this success can be limited by the legal process, the company's employment practices and culture, and their own willingness to make radical changes to their organisation. Once a manager has achieved building a Leadership Organisation, however, the rewards of success are well worth the effort.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP), a technological approach for enterprise information systems, has many recorded case examples of lengthy and expensive implementations reported in literature. This research has uncovered an alternative process‐driven and document‐based approach that may offer a simpler and more flexible solution compared with technology‐driven ERP. This paper investigates the differences and similarities of the two approaches, and also answers a related question: Is the enterprise system implementation an information systems effort performed to support the business processes, or is it a process re‐engineering effort required to implement the pre‐packaged software system?

To investigate the advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches to an enterprise information system, this research developed a unified modeling language (UML) process model of a manufactured housing company and used it as a basis for a conceptual level UML model for both an ERP‐ and a document‐based system.

In a designed experiment with UML‐fluent analysts, the process‐driven document solution to an enterprise information system was shown to be smaller, less complex and more flexible than an ERP solution at the conceptual design level.

Software specifications for the resulting document‐based system included only standard COTS software packages easily usable in companies of any size. Further, the potential for prototype as‐you‐go development offers opportunities for continuous refinement of the system in contrast with the episodic implementation of packaged ERP systems.

This alternative system highlights the desirability, for both academicians and practitioners, of concentrating on processes and then implementing the most suitable technology, rather than allowing the technology to impose constraints on processes.

The Xtreme Football League began play in 2001, but lasted for only a single season. It combined the marketing savvy of the World Wrestling Federation with NBC's broadcasting expertise to produce a distinctive sports entertainment product. This case study describes the events that lead to the introduction of the new league, and the league's only season. The factors that contributed to the demise of the XFL are discussed. Some implications of this short “experiment” with a new sports-entertainment league to sports marketers are provided.

Business process re‐engineering (BPR) is certainly one of the latest buzzwords and is the subject of great interest and also great controversy. Organizations need to shake themselves out of complacency to close competitive gaps and achieve superior performance standards ‐ the reason why many have embarked on huge BPR projects. In view of the high risks associated with radical change, there are, however, many problems associated with BPR. For some BPR is going off the rails before it is properly understood, and many BPR exercises are not delivering the goods. Sometimes, organizations are expecting “quick fixes”, thus displaying their lack of understanding of a complex system. It is unreasonable to expect quick results when so much change is involved, especially when these business processes involve not only machines, but also people. Many believe, such as Mumford, that the management of change is the largest task in re‐engineering. Many people perceive re‐engineering as a threat to both their methods and their jobs. Owing to this recognition, many authors concentrate on the need to take account of the human side of re‐engineering, in particular the management of organizational change.