Combining Business Process Reengineering Concepts and Object-Oriented Technology for Effective Organizational Design

Abstract

Today's business world is facing a plethora of managerial and technological changes beyond the capacity of any firm to control and absorb them. Customer satisfaction, development of new products, and introduction of new technologies are well-known driving forces, but their fast mutation and turmoil are making them unpredictable. Business process reengineering (BPR) is considered the most disruptive approach for designing organizations that can thrive in this turbulent environment. Although there is an increasing number of experiences that testify to its positive results, at present it is used mainly in large companies, and small and medium firms consider it as a risky and expensive activity. Within this framework, this article discusses a methodology for designing and implementing BPR, developed to overcome most of the limits that still bind its diffusion. This methodology supports firms in embedding reengineered processes knowledge owned by organizational units and in integrating available software and hardware, The focus of this article is on linking business and software modeling to allow the development of ad hoc new business processes while reducing risk of wasting time and money for useless requirements or for stiff solutions. The proposed methodology, starting from organizational requirements derived from business modeling, supports the analysis of costs, lead time, and quality or completeness trade-off of developed solutions. The phases of the methodology are discussed in detail together with an application example and results obtained from existing successful applications.