Of course, nobody referred to what Whitney and Ford did as business process reengineering, but both examples illustrate what BPR can accomplish when the technology becomes available. Ford lowered the cost of each car by drastically increasing production. Before then, highly skilled gunsmiths built each gun by hand, so each gun was unique - and very expensive.Ī century later, Henry Ford’s introduction of the assembly line revolutionized car making and manufacturing in general. He completed the contract (years late, as it turned out, which even then was fairly typical for government contractors) by using premade parts assembled by relatively unskilled workers. Whitney, at the time already famous for his invention of the cotton gin that removed seeds from raw cotton, won a federal government contract to manufacture 10,000 muskets for the U.S.

The first well-documented example of BPR is Eli Whitney’s revolutionary introduction of standardized parts for gunmaking at the beginning of the 19th century. Technological changes have long driven BPR. While the term “business process reengineering” has been in the management lexicon since the mid 1980s, the idea is actually much older. The key to understanding BPR: Learning its history By the early 1990s, BPR was widely considered smart management. Though Davenport and Hammer eventually parted ways, the world of business enthusiastically embraced their advocacy for radically altering business processes to take advantage of cost savings. Hammer described BPR in detail in an article in the Harvard Business Review published in 1990 under the title “ Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate.” He scolded corporate managers for using technology “to mechanize old ways of doing business” and claimed, “They leave the existing processes intact and use computers simply to speed them up.” As prices for business-adaptable technologies became more reasonable, the professors’ research gained more attention. The goal was to develop a systematic approach to incorporating the new technology - exemplified by the personal computer and the rapidly growing internet - into daily business processes.

Some of the largest corporations of the time funded their research. Two university professors, Michael Hammer of MIT and Thomas Davenport of Babson College, are generally credited with coining the term “business process reengineering” through their joint research process called PRISM (Partnership for Research in Information Systems Management).

Business process reengineering (BPR) is a method of change management that began in the 1980s when the tech revolution was just beginning to reshape business procedures.

Michael hammer reengineering