【正文】 truly a homegrown one, and as we shall discuss later, not an import. As with all things American, its sweep is vast, its opportunities are immense and the dangers of failure real. In this report, we first provide the scope of this innovation its impact on business and the mutations it is undergoing through case studies. This is followed by a summary of analytical tools used in this innovation. Subsequently, we examine its consequences in governmental policies and human resource strategies. We then briefly summarize the differences in the practice of reengineering between Japan and the United States, since the . is concernedsome would say excessivelywith the way Japan conducts its business. In summary, we see an evolution, even within a short period of a few years, as reengineering is changing rapidly losing some of its harddoctrinal stances and learning to work with new technologies. But more changes are needed, some urgently so, in areas such as human resources. Rightly, or wrongly, Business Process Reengineering has e to be identified with Big People Reduction! This image has to be shed if reengineering is to be accepted by the majority. Section 3: ReengineeringReengineering is not the first and the only innovation in the business processes. Initially, concepts and practices such as Total Quality Management (TQM), concurrent engineering (sometimes referred to as simultaneous engineering), ‘just in time’ inventories, ‘timepression’ and lean production have been introduced as remedial measures. Studies by Kim Clark and Fujimoto {Clark K and Fujimoto,P., 1991} on the parative performance of automobile manufacturing in three continents or the adaptation of Deming’s teachings on quality management {Deming, 1986} or Kaizan, its Japanese version, have helped US corporations to introduce improvements in their manufacturing. These, even when successful, are only of limited applicability and do not substitute a radical restructuring that Drucker advocated or the group from MIT remended. The paradigm shifts in manufacturing technologies as identified by Jaikumar {1988} have still not been acmodated by the required revolutionary structural changes of industrial organization. Majority of the improvements, as we noted earlier, in spite of effecting continuous improvements in many areas of production, have continued to preserve organizational structures with their divisions, rules of business, mand and control systems intact, instead of change. The corporate culture still regards organizational hierarchies as sacrosanct more than its relationship with the customers. It is in this business practice context that reengineering has emerged as a more holistic alternative. A Definition The goal of reengineering, or, to be exact, Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is its aim to destroy the organization as it exists and recreate a new one that focuses exclusively on business processes. In Schumpeterian terms, BPR is a creative destruction process removing function based vertically structured hierarchies by efficient, process centered independent and empowered horizontal structures. As a point of reference, we define BPR, offered by Hammer and Champy {Hammer,M. and Champy, J., 1993} in their book Reengineering Corporations, as the radical rethinking of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality and speed. This definition effectively rules out the incremental process improvements brought in by quality management or concurrent engineering as reengineering. Nevertheless, these improvements can be subsets of the entire reengineering process and the incremental improvements they bring in may even turn out to be useful determinants. We shall therefore cite instances of such improvements in this report as part of analysis of the reengineering experience in American corporations. Modeling and Simulation of Processes Reengineering consists of restructuring all the processes in the business so that they bee efficient, transparent and integrated with other processes in the system seamlessly. In turn, this requires that every process in the existing system be first scrutinized to assess its performance and to delineate its crossfunctional role before it is eliminated, modified or replaced by a new process. For such analysis, versatile and efficient tools and simulation techniques are critical. Many modeling approaches have been used including a recent one based on Systems Engineering{Bhasker,R., 1995}. While, most business processes are plex and are not easily amenable to analytic modeling without approximations, simulation models and methods capture plex processes more effectively and can be subsequently validated and optimized. In this report, we therefore discuss various analytic methods, simulation techniques and their tools that are now available for BPR. Information Technology and Reengineering Information Technology (IT) is perhaps the most effective enabling technology for reengineering. It helps in meeting the objectives of reengineering in three ways: by providing information across functional levels and establishing easy munication, improving the performance of the processes itself, and also by helping the reengineering effort by modeling, optimizing and assessing its consequences. The veritable richness of this single technology has led many to interpret reengineering as the application of IT to business processes. We shall discuss the role IT plays in some American reengineering efforts. Corporations and Reengineering In this report, we shall cite three recent examples of . manufacturing firms that have transformed their organizations entirely through reengineering. In addition, we shall discuss the example of a defense contractor venturing into a civilian areas of business and reengineering the entire process to introduce a new and a petitive product and, service. American business is not exclus