【正文】 ng itself and others from defence industries reengineering themselves to acmodate ending of the Cold War and declining defence budgets. Reengineering depends on people: the way they learn their jobs, work and collaborate with their colleagues. Often, this involves learning new trades and work practices, and embracing a new work ethic that transcends the narrow specialization that the workers find themselves in. Past industrial innovations, successful as they had been, practiced division of labor on the work force to a degree that almost eclipsed the need for human ingenuity and innovation. BPR has brought changes in the way the work force is perceived for effecting organizational changes. Most successful examples of BPR are therefore from the corporations that practice retraining programs. While bigger corporations have the resources to reengineer their processes and retrain their work force, their successes also depend on how effective their suppliers in the value chain are in practicing BPR. The problem of implementing BPR and the training of the work force in supporting firms is generally believed to be the responsibility of the individual firms. Contrary to general belief, the US government is not a passive observer of the restructuring of business processes that are now underway in the country. It is intervening actively by providing initiatives and inducements to all firms for continuing education and retraining programs. The US govemment is also intervening actively in an innovative fashion to fill the gaps seen in US panies, specially in processing and manufacturing stages. These are considered essential to keep American products globally petitive. The US federal and university laboratories, large and successful as they are, have been singularly ineffective in transferring these technologies to US industries. Existing laws in place and concerns about patent rights and public knowledge have discouraged close collaboration between the laboratories and industries. The US government has introduced multiagency (Defense, Commerce, NASA, NSF and ARPA, and Transportation) programs in defense, dualuse and civilian sectors supporting short term programs of research in high risk, high value manufacturing process technologies. The major condition of support of such programs is that the program should be mercially relevant to industry and jointly pursued by laboratories and industries, with leadership and matching financial contributions from industry. In this report, we discusses these initiatives, known as ATP (Advanced Technology Program) and TRP (Technology Reinvestment Program) and their performance to date. The success of Japanese firms in capturing a significant part of the US automobile market in the 7039。 servicing contributes a major ponent to the GDP and to employment generation. In 1991, 76 percent of output came from services, and the value it added to the economy is about 70 percent. It also contributes some key elements to manufacturing: vendors and customers are served by this industry. We shall therefore include some examples of reengineering efforts in this area that have turned out to be successful. Because of the very scope and size of the efforts demanded by reengineering, the examples are still very few, though there are numerous instances of panies reengineering a process or two, no doubt hoping that the visible success of the efforts would make reengineering more palatable. The Role of Technology Reengineering does not claim to substitute for either a sound business strategy, product or technology. It is only a mechanism for radically improving the performance of the business processes for the vendors, customers and products. But by centering the whole concept on processes, reengineering is inextricably linked to technologies。s, the initial turnaround of Chrysler was mainly fueled by sales, the marketing strategies of Lee Iacoca and the fortuitous demands for its mini vans. All these took place without major changes in the structure or the functioning of the pany. In spite of these changes, the ponent based approach to automobile design and manufacture, still required a year cycle. More, it was burdened was with too many car designs and no ownership of the models within the firm. To understand its problems, Chrysler undertook an eighteen month study, similar to that of Xerox {Jacobson, G. and Hillkirk, J., 1987}, first by benchmarking Honda39。s new reengineered corporation. The layout and architecture of the Center39。s strategies through the diamondstar (MitsubishiChrysler) collaboration and later, the successful Jeep operations of the newly acquired American Motors. Learning from these benchmarking experiments, Chrysler embarked on a creativedestruction process by instituting dramatic cultural changes that destroyed the functional silosbased vertical organization and creating a reengineered workplace. This workplace, centered around the four cross functional platform teams for large cars, small cars, mini vans and Jeep vehicles and trucks. The objective was further sharpened to address only the American market, a market that was lost to the Japanese and its US rivals, especially the Ford. The results of the reengineering efforts were beginning to show in 1992. In 37 months from design, Chrysler had in production the LH series of cars using the platform team organization. This was done with 740 people as opposed to 1400 previously for similar size cars. The engine development time for a liter option was reduced from 240 weeks to 187 weeks {Gardner, G., 1993, IMB, 1993}. Chrysler then embarked on a development of a pact car, Neon as a direct petition to the Japanese imports. Chrysler developed Neon on its own, without any foreign collaborator a first for an American car pany in the small car category. The car was in production in 31 months. It is reported that the next generation LH car would take only 24 months. In 1994, Chrysler was a