Organizational Performance Improvement

Executive Summary

Background and Introduction

The purpose of this document is to equip the reader with general knowledge pertaining to issues related to business process reengineering and total quality management. The key issues addressed provide insight to advantages and disadvantages of inducing change into an organization.

Main Conclusions

Many corporations have achieved great deal of success through BPR and TQM. Either way consumers expect new and better products every year. Therefore, corporations must find new ways to better streamline their processes while continuously gaining improved product quality.

Recommendations

In essence, should corporations desire to remain competitive, increase market share and solidify their market position as a provider of quality products they ought to apply principles of TQM to complement and enhance on business process reengineering.

Table of Contents

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 1

Background and Introduction 1

Main Conclusions 1

Recommendations 1

BUSINESS PROCESS REENGINEERING AND TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT 3

Background 3

BPR 3

TQM 4

BPR and TQM Comparison 4

Future Trends 5

Limitations, Conclusions and Recommendations 5

BIBLIOGRAPHY 6

Business Process Reengineering and Total Quality Management

The 21st Century corporations have found themselves being challenged by other corporations on many levels. These competitive new levels pertain to not just a newer product or service, but something different. Such corporations were able to achieve better results in productivity or administrative functions by applying new business process reengineering techniques.

Background

Business process reengineering (BPR) has been known as a top-down approach to change often seeking radical redesign and drastic improvement of processes. On the other hand, total quality management (TQM) emphasizes on incremental improvement in work processes and outputs over an open-ended period of time (Davenport & Short, 1990).

BPR

The reengineering practice represents a move towards a total change in the organizational structure and its processes. BPR is a very complicated process which involves company wide processes and procedures. At BPR level everything needs to be reengineered as if a new corporate culture is adopted. BPR projects are very hard to implement and result in layoffs and early retirement packages. One advantage to BPR over TQM is that it can be implemented at any level in the organization. One example could be on identifying potential loss of time and money in a call center operation due to lack of procedures. While TQM is mainly focusing on product quality improvement BPR is focused on the process of achieving that quality.

TQM

Total quality management has its roots long before BPR was introduced in the manufacturing industries, services delivery lines and the like. TQM has been proven very effective at improving product quality and the general level of manufacturing productivity. Many corporations which implemented TQM have see great results from Ford to GM and other manufacturing corporations. As TQM was initially seen as just a quality control procedure it too evolved into the manufacturing and engineering practices which heavily relied on statistical analysis.