Posts
2A. What are the characteristics of the re-engineered process? Explain.
Ans The characteristics of re-engineered Process are following
Several jobs are combined into one
The most basic and common feature of re-engineered processes is the absence of an assembly line, that is, many formerly distinct jobs or tasks are integrated and compressed into one.
In the re-engineered process, the company compressed responsibility for the various steps and assigned it to one person, the "customer service representative". That person performs the entire process and also serves as single point of contact for the customer. Such an individual responsible for an end-to end process is known as a case worker.
It is not always possible to compress all of the steps in a lengthy process into one integrated job performed by a single person. In some situations, the various steps must be performed in different locations. In those instances, a company needs several people, each managing parts of the process. In other cases, it may not prove practical to teach one person all the skills he or she would need to perform the entire process.
To eliminate the hand-offs, the company organized a case team, a group of people who have among them all the skills that are needed to handle an installation order.
Case team members- who previously were located in different departments at several geographic locations were brought together into a single unit and given total responsibility for installing the equipment. While handoffs between team members may still create some delays and errors, they are insignificant compared to the problems thta the cross -organisational handoffs caused. Perhaps most important, everyone now knows who has responsibility for geting an order processed quickly and accurately. The payoff of integrated processes, case workers and case teams can be enormous. Eliminating handoffs means doing away with errors,delay and rework that they engender. Typically, a case worker-based process operates ten times faster than the assembly line version that it replaces.
Integrated processes have also reduced process administration overheads. Because employees involved in the process assume responsibility for making sure that customers requirements are met on time, and with no defects, they need less supervision. Instead, the comopany encourages these empowered employees to find innovative and creative ways to reduce cycle time and cost continually while producing a defect-free product or service.
Workers make decision
Companies that undertake re-engineering, not only compress processes horizontally by having case workers or case teams perform multiple,sequential tasks but vertically as well. Vertical compression means that at the points in the process where had to go up the managerial hierarchy for an answer, they now make their own decisions. Instead of separating decision-making from real work,decision-making becomes part of work. Workers themselves now do that portion of the job that, formerly, managers performed.
Under the mass production paradigm, the tacit assumption is that the people actually performing work have neither the time nor the inclination to monitor and control it and they lack the depth and breadth of knowledge required to make decision about it. The industrial practice of building hierarchical management structures follows from this assumption. Accountants, auditors and supervisors check, record and monitor work. Managers supervise the worker bees and handle the exceptions. This assumption and its consequences need to be discarded.
The benefits of compressing work vertically as well as horizontally include fewer delays. lower overhead costs,better customer response and greater empowerment for workers.
The Steps in the Process are Performed in a Natural Order
Re-engineering processes are freed from tyranny of straight-line sequence,natural precedence in the work,rather than the artifical one intrduced by linearity, can be exploited. Typically, in a conventional process, person 1 must complete task 1 before passing the results to person 2 to do task 2. But what if task 2 could be performed simultaneously with task1? Linear sequencing of tasks imposes an artifical precedence that slows work down.
In the re-engineered processes, work is sequenced in terms of what needs to follow what. "Delinearizing" processes speeds them up in two ways. First, many jobs getdone simultaneously. Second, reducing the amount of time that elapses between the early and late steps of a process narrows the window for major change that might make the earlier. Organizations, thereby,encounter less rework,which is another source of delay.
Processes have Multiple Version
The fourth common characteristic of re-engineered processes is end of standardization. Traditional processes were intended to provide mass production for the mass market. All inputs were handled identically, so companies could produce uniform and consistent outputs. In a world of diverse and changing markets, that logic is obsolete. To meet the demands of today's environment,there is a need for multiple versions of the same process, each one tuned to the requirements of different markets,situation or inputs. These new processes must also have the same economies of scale that result from mass production. Processes with multiple versions or paths usually begin with a "triage"step to determine which version works best in given solution. Traditional one size-fits-all processes are usually very complex, since they must incorporate speical procedures and exceptions to handle a wide range of situations. A multi-version process, by contrast, is clean and simple, because each version needs to handle only the cases for which it is appropriate. There are no special cases and exceptions.
Work is Performed Where it Makes the Most Sense
A fifth recurring theme in re-engineered processes is the shifting of work across organizational boundaries. In traditinal organizations, work is organized around specialists-and not just on the factory floor. Accountants know how to count and purchasing clerks know how to order things .So when the accounting department needs new pencils, the purchasing department buys them. Purchasing finds vendors,negotitates price,places the order,inspects the goods and pays the invoice-and eventually the accountants get their pencils,unless the approved supplier is short on pencils and purchasing decides to substitute pens. This kind of process is expensive,since it involves a varietyof department plus the overhead that's associated with tracking all the paper and fitting all the price together.
In other words, in the aftermath of re-engineering, the correspondence between processes and organizations may look very different from how it looked beforehand. Work
Checks and Controls are Reduced
Another kind of nonvalue-adding work that gets minimized in re-engineered processes is checking and control, or to put it more precisely, re-engineered processes use controls only to the extent that they make economic sense.
Conventional processes are replete with checking and control steps,which add no value but are included to ensure that people aren't abusing the process. While that objective may be laudable, many organizations fail to recognize the costs associated with stict control. It takes time and labour to do all this checking, in fact,it may take more time and effort to do the checking than to do the actual purchasing. Worse, the cost of the checking may even exceed the costs of the goods being purchased.
Re-engineered processes exhibit a more balanced approach. Instead of tightly checking work as it is performed,re-engineered processes often have aggregate or deferred controls. These control systems,by design,tolerate modest and limited abuse,by delaying the point at which abuse is detected or by examining aggregate patterns rather than individual instances. The re-engineered control systems,however,more than compensate for any possible increase in abuse by dramatically lowering the costs and other encumbrances associated with the control itself.
Reconciliation is Minimized
Yet another form of nonvalue-adding work that re-engineered process minimize is reconciliation. They do it by cutting back the number of external contact points that a process has, thereby reducing the chances that inconsistent data requiring reconciliation will be received.
A Case Manager Provides a Single Point of Contact
The use of someone called a "case manager" is anothe recurring characteristics found in re-engineered processes. This mechanism proves useful when the steps of a process either are so complex or are dispersed in such a way that integrating them for a single person or even a small team is impossible. Acting as a buffer between the still complex process and the consumer,the case manager behaves with the customer as if he or she were responsible for performing the entire process,even though that is really not the case.
To perform this role-that is,to be able to answer the customer's questions and solve customer problems-the case manager needs access to all the information systems that the people actually performing the process use and the ability to contact those people with questions and requests for further assistance when necessary.
The case managers are sometimes called "empowered" customer service representatives(CSRs) to distinguish them from traditional CSRs,who are often people with little information and less clout. Enpowered CSRs can actually get things done. At a large public utility,case managers present customers with the useful fiction of an intergrated customer service process by handling all their problems while shielding them from the real complexities of the actual process.
Hybrid Centralized/Decentralized Operations are Prevalent
Companies that have re-engineered their processes have the ability to combine the advantages and decentralization in the same process. At a computer manufacturing company,a standard purchasing system and a shared database allow the company to combine the best of both worlds.
Information technology increasingly enables companies to operate as though their individual units were fully autonomous,while the organization still enjoys the economies of scaleh that centralization creates. Equipping field sales representatives with notebook computers connected by wireless modems to the central office or to corporate headquarters,for instance,gives sales people instant access to information that is maintained there. At the same time,controls incorporated into the software they use to write up sales prices or specifying delivery or other conditions that the organization canot meet. With this technology,companies ca re-engineer the sales process so as to eliminate the bureaucratic machinery of the regional field offices,enhance the sales representatives autonomy and empowerment and simultaneously,improve the contol the company has over selling price and condition.
2B. What is the difference between deductive thinking and inductive thinking? How does relate to re- engineering?
Ans To recognize the power inherent in modern information technology and to visualize its application requires that companies uas a form of thinking that business people usually do not learn and with which they may feel uncomfortable. Many managers think deductively. That is, they are good a defining a problem or problems, then seeking and evaluating different solutions to it. Whereas applying information technology to business process re-engineering demands inductive thinking. Inductive thinking thinking is ability to first recognize a powerful solution and then seek the problems it might solve,problems the company probably does not even know that it has.What most companies ask is "how can we use these new technological capabilities to enhance or streamline or improve what we are already doing?" But what they should be asking is ,"How can we use the technology to allow us to do things that we are not already doing?'
This makes re-engineering involve the aspect of innovation over mere automation. It is about exploiting the latest capabilities of technology to achieve entirely new goals.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment