Businesses - Does Business Process Reengineering Liberate or Exploit Workers - Essay Example

Businesses - Does BPR liberate or exploit workers? How? Introduction Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is an organizational approach based on science and management in order to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of employees and the business processes in organizations. Most of the business organizations undertake modification of their existing processes and strategies for improving the overall productivity of the organization. But, such modifications will always address only the surface level problems and may not penetrate deep into the grass root level to remove the problems from there. The main architects of Business Process Engineering (BPR), Michael Hammer and James A. Champy, have argued that organizations are simply wasting their time by shifting the tasks involved in a process between departments instead of bringing all the tasks under the centralized control of a process control team (12 Manage, 2010) They have argued that the suppliers, distributors and the business partners should be brought under one umbrella in order to execute the process more easily and effectively in quick time. Hammer, a former professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has argued that most of the works done by the organizations are not giving any value to the customers even though the resources were exploited heavily. He argued that the resource utilization must be minimized and the customer value should be increased by organizations as part of the BPR. BPR has shaken the business world in the 90’s and many organizations were started to implement it for raising the effectiveness of their firm. The arrival of BPR has brought lot of controversies also. Critics argued that BPR is misused for exploiting the workers rather than utilizing the resources effectively by organizations. On the other hand proponents argued that BPR liberated workers by making their tasks lot easier. This paper tries to answer the question; Does BPR liberate or exploit workers? How? Business Process Reengineering Muthu et al (1999) has defined BPR as the reengineering of the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in performances such as cost, quality, service and speed (Muthu et al, 1999, p.1). Organizations are currently looking for cost reduction in all the departments without sacrificing the quality of their products. Increased competition has forced them to improve the speed and service extended to the customers and BPR is one way of achieving the above objectives. BPR involve; Business Process Redesign, Business Transformation, or Business Process Change Management. Etc. It is a combination of business innovation and improvements to business processes to make the company much stronger and more successful. Davenport (1992) has argued that business must be perceived not in terms of functions, divisions or products, but of key processes (Davenport, 1992, p.1). Many organizations are satisfied, once they were able to formulate different departments like production, sales, planning, administration, quality etc and allotting the works to these departments. They often think that once the allotment and the division of the departments were over, it is the duty of the department heads to lead their departments efficiently. Moreover, they also believe that if the different departments in an organization function efficiently, the collective efforts will improve the overall efficiency of the organization. But this argument seems to be baseless since the modern organizations work on processes rather than departments or divisions. For example, current organizations construct teams for performing a particular process and each team member may have different tasks to perform. Moreover, these team members might be from different departments of the organization and may have different skills. Davenport (1992) has also mentioned that 5 to 10% improvement in business processes each year may achieve 50 to 100% of improvements in some key process levels (Davenport, 1992, p.1) Hammer and Champy (1993) have mentioned that the overall processes of producing a product or delivering a service became more complicated at present as the number of tasks involved grows (Hammer and Champy, 1993, p.19). For example, the increase of terrorism and terrorist’s activities forced the airport authorities to strengthen their security measures. It is not easy for the passengers to enter the flight without undergoing a vigorous body check up using a body scanner in American airports. In other words, in order to ensure the passenger safety, the airport authorities were forced to incorporate more processes before the passenger get into the flight. Hammer and Champy (1993) have also mentioned that the work which requires the coordination of several different departments within a company is often a source of trouble (Hammer and Champy, 1993, p.19). In the above example itself, the safety of the passenger can be ensured only by the combined efforts of the government, airport authorities, passengers and the flight authorities which makes the flight travel more complicated at present. BPR is necessary for reducing the complexities involved in the flight travel process. For example, the body scanning of passengers have brought lot of controversies as the naked images of the passengers can be misused. Many people have argued against it since it is an intrusion into the privacy of people. The assurance of passenger safety should not be at the expense of the passengers and the airliners and the authorities should develop others means to ensure passenger safety. BPR will help the service providers like the airliners to develop more comprehensive safety measures, which may not cause any harm to the passengers. Hammer (1996) has mentioned that reengineering will help a company to change the relationships with its customers (Hammer, 1996, p.25) Relationship building is accepted as the core of all the business activities at present. Earlier, business people used all the means to exploit the customer for their temporary gains. But now they have realized that for long term goals, it is essential to keep a good relationship with the customers. Hammer also pointed out that reengineering does not merely enhance the individual steps, but reconsiders the entire steps involved in a process. He has defined a task as the unit of work which is often controlled by a single person and a process as a group activity. He has argued that many managers were unaware of the various processes involved in an organization, never thought about it, never measured them and never considered improving them (Hammer, 1996, p.5, 6 &82). One of my relative who is working in a tire manufacturing company has told me the story of a manager who was punished by the organization for the lack of attention he provided to a critical process. This manager had around 30 years of experience in that organization and thought that he knows everything. The management has decided to make an experimental tire and instructed the manager and other concerning departments using inter-office memo to make that experimental tire in a particular shift. This manager has failed to read that memo and took no actions for making that tire on that particular shift and demoted by the organization later. Thus the awareness of various processes involved in an organization is essential both for the managers and the workers and BPR will help workforce to better understand the organizational processes. The implementation of BPR has many disadvantages also. Weicher et al (1995) has mentioned that BPR is often used by companies on the brink of disaster to cut costs and return to profitability and the danger is that during this process the company may slash its capacity for future growth (Weicher et al, 1995, p.3). At the same time Knights and Willmott, (2000) has argued that BPR can enable companies to make a leap-frog rather than simply struggle incrementally to catch up with competitors (Knights and Willmott, 2000, p.6). In any case, the workers always may have lot of concerns when organizations implement new strategies like BPR, TQM or HRM Does BPR liberate or exploit workers? How? Pruijt (1998), has described BPR as the product of the management fad industry, as part of a neo-Taylorist movement, (because of the top-down streamlining of operations, unproblematic acceptance of typical Taylorist solutions and the prevalence of assertions that the outcome for workers is an upgraded work content), as a euphemism for downsizing and as a non-normative, descriptive label for process oriented change (Pruijt, 1998). Organizations are always looking for options to exploit the workers as much as possible to improve their profits. The current global recession has forced the organizations to device new strategies to stay in the market and many organizations have put the load of extra effort on the shoulders of the workers to come out from the recession in the name of BPR. For example, many organizations have reduced their workforce while giving extra burdens to those who have been retained. Knights and Willmott (2000) have cited a survey result (New management opinion survey) for showing the worker’s response to BPR. They have mentioned that out of the 472 workplace representatives from all industrial sectors surveyed, only 8% believed that their job satisfaction had increased after the implementation of BPR, 53% found no changes and 39% found that the job satisfaction decreased (Knights and Willmott, 2000, p.137) Knights and Willmott have pointed out many drawbacks of BPR; it is detrimental to worker’s interests, Lack of flexibility in work, Lack of temporal flexibility in work etc (Knights and Willmott, 2000, p.140, 141& 142). Workers normally like to have some flexibility in their work. For example, they would like to have some breaks, holidays or opportunity for enjoyments in between the busy schedules of their work. BPR will never allow the luxury of such flexibility in working. Many people like to have some vacation to release their stress related to profession and family life. I.B.M. has been trying out a new vacation policy, in which fixed vacation rules are replaced by informal agreements between employees and their immediate supervisor. The guiding principle is that the work must get done. As long as this is the case, employees can take as much vacation as they want, even on short notice (Is flexibility at work good or bad?, 2007) Weicher et al, 1995 has argued that classical reengineering repeats the mistakes by separating the design of work from its execution. They pointed out that the major obstacles to BPR as the fear among employees that their jobs are endangered and that years of experience will account for nothing (Weicher et al, 1995, p.2 & 5). BPR sometimes forces the employees to complete some tasks which may be out of their skill areas. For example, when the computer was first introduced in to organizations, many of the traditional typewriters who don’t have much knowledge about the computers were forced to take computer training out of the fear of losing their job. Knights and Willmott have also described the positives of BPR. BPR involves the intention and the techniques to both intensify and extensify the level of labour exploitation often through the use of dead labour. They argued that the exploitation of dead labour is mutually beneficial. It is a fact that many organizations have a collection of dead labours. These dead labours happen to be in the organization because of some commitments or legal formalities. For example, in Middle Eastern countries, private organizations need to appoint a substantial number of locals in order to reduce the unemployment of the locals. This legal requirement forces organizations operating in this region to appoint some locals even if they were incompetent for the profession for which were appointed. In other words, such labours can be referred as the dead labour for the organization. BPR tries to utilize such dead labour by providing enough training to the dead labour in order to make them useful to the organization. Employee empowerment is one of the major advantages of BPR. The empowerment programs undertaken as part of the BPR will help the employees to get more training on organizational matters which will definitely improve their skills and competence which is essential for them to stay in the current competitive professional world. The empowerment programs will reduce the complexities of their work and it will help them to improve their productivity and efficiency and subsequently they will be able to attain higher places in the organization. Conclusions Business Process reengineering is a corporate strategy like other new strategies like Total Quality Management (TQM) and Human Resource Management (HRM) to improve the efficiency and productivity of the workers and the organization. Competition is becoming stiff as the time passes and the fluctuations in global economy forces the organizations to implement new strategies to strengthen their competitive power and to stay in the market. But, these strategies like the BPR are not so popular among the workers because of their concerns about practical difficulties and the over exploitation by the management. Lack of flexibility in work lack of temporal flexibility, compulsion to undertake works not related to the expertise areas, fear of losing jobs etc are some of the major drawbacks of business process reengineering. At the same time management will always try to reduce the dead labour and for that purpose they will provide employee empowerment programs which will definitely improve the skills and competence of the workers. The improvement of skills and competence will be mutually beneficial both to the organization and the workers. The improvement of skill set will help the employees to improve their bargaining power and to achieve higher places in the organization. In short, business process reengineering has many benefits and problems form the worker’s perspective. References 1. Davenport Thomas H. (1992), Process Innovation: Reengineering Work Through Information Technology Publisher: Harvard Business Press (October 1, 1992) 2. Hammer, M. (1996). Beyond reengineering. New York, NY: Harper Business 3. Hammer, M. and Champy, J. (1993). Reengineering the corporation: a manifesto for business revolution. New York, NY: Harper Business. 4. Is flexibility at work good or bad?, (2007), Retrieved on 19 January 2010 from http://positivesharing.com/2007/09/is-flexibility-at-work-good-or-bad/ 5. Knights, D. and H. Willmott (2000) The Reengineering Revolution, London: Routledge, http://books.google.co.in/books?id=RG6w52ERfnUC&dq=The+Reengineering+Revolut,+Willmott&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=IgvEhiTnZP&sig=-vetsIexXCPtF6uMoTM0hsSTdF0&hl=en&ei=LANVS9m6O5Ls7APwndjtCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CBAQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=&f=false 6. 12 Manage, (2010), Business Process Reengineering, Retrieved on 19 January 2010 from http://www.12manage.com/methods_bpr.html 7. Muthu Subramanian, Whitman Larry, and Cheraghi Hossein S. (1999), Retrieved on 19 January 2010 from http://webs.twsu.edu/whitman/papers/ijii99muthu.pdf 8. Pruijt Hans, (1998), Multiple personalities: the case of business process Reengineering, Retrieved on 19 January 2010 from http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/viewContentItem.do?contentType=Article&hdAction=lnkhtml&contentId=1411002 9. Weicher Maureen, Chu William W., Wan Ching Lin, Van Le and Dominic Yu (1995), Business Process Reengineering Analysis and Recommendations, Retrieved on 19 January 2010 from http://www.netlib.com/files/bpr1.pdf Read More