【文章內容簡介】 troduction of new products and costs. This study of 200 panies was the first to identify these gaps in the US system and traced their origin to the age of mass production, antitrust laws, use of workers as mere skilled operators, overemphasis on products rather than on processes and to an environment that has long ceased to exist. This group found these strategies to be outdated in the face of increased global trading, emergence of new technologies and their speedy assimilation by many countries and the growth of sophistication among consumers. Thanks to new technologies, manufacturing and process technologies were making production more flexible, streamlined and efficient bringing in a quality previously thought as unachievable and at a speed considered unattainable. The workforce was no longer a collection of skilled individuals but groups with petence transcending many areas of manufacturing, and motivated by teamspirit, delegated power and vested authority. All these, according to this study, were missing in the American industrial and manufacturing scene. Even in the 1960s, the management guru, Peter Drucker{1969}, in a deeply perceptive book, The Age of Discontinuity, lamented the lack of any change in the structure of industrial organizations in step with the impressive growth of economy and technologies. Small midcourse corrections were introduced in the well established but outdated structures to provide continuity when radical reforms and pathbreaking restructuring were in order. This report discusses one major business process innovation that is now sweeping the United States consuming the traditional, but increasingly inefficient, ways of doing business. Reengineering has been the banner of this change in business practices. This innovation is 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 fi