Business process reengineering (BPR) projects have been carried out for many years, with varying degrees of success. Two key reasons for failure are distinguished from the literature: insufficient stakeholder involvement and poor analyses of the business processes. The purpose of this paper is to present a decade of field experiences with collaborative BPR. Nine BPR projects were executed and analyzed in detail, leading to the identification of 87 themes regarding the efficiency and effectiveness of the project. These themes were organized into 12 categories of lessons learned that provide insight into the "best practices" and together informed the evolution of the collaborative business engineering (CBE) approach to BPR. The CBE approach combines a BPR process with collaboration and simulation modeling support to address the above-mentioned reasons for failure in BPR. The field experiences show that the CBE approach can be successfully applied for BPR projects in real life.

Collaborative Business Engineering: A Decade of Lessons from the Field

Groups often rely on the expertise of facilitators to support them in their collaboration processes. The design and preparation of a collaboration process is an important facilitation task. Although there is a significant body of knowledge about the effects of facilitation, there is a dearth of knowledge about the ways in which facilitators design collaboration processes. Increased understanding in this area will contribute to the effective design and use of collaboration support and to the development of collaboration process design support. The research reported in this paper explores the strategies and techniques facilitators use to design a collaboration process, and the aspects of this task they perceive as challenging. We present the results of a questionnaire among professional facilitators. We compare facilitators with different expertise levels to identify challenges in the design of collaboration processes. We discovered that although the activities performed and information used by novices is not very different from expert practices, their limited experience makes them less flexible. When the actual session brings surprises such as different outcomes or conflict, novices cannot easily adapt their designs to accommodate these. © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007.

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Issues in the design of facilitated collaboration processes

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to assess whether the business process management (BPM) approach contributes to applying systemic characteristics in organisationsDesign/methodology/approach – This is a theoretical and descriptive work based on a review of the literature on BPM and systemic approachFindings – From the analysis of its stages, it was possible to find a strong correspondence between BPM and the systemic characteristics found in the literaturePractical implications – The paper presents practical implications to professionals as well as academics The contribution to the body of knowledge on BPM derives from the identification of systemic characteristics in it, thus justifying its practical application to organisations in order to ensure better systemicity and adaptability As processes are directed to the same goal, unnecessary and misdirected steps are redesigned or eliminated, concentrating resources on core processes and improving the organisation's performance The paper also con

Business process management: a systemic approach?

Purpose – The need for studying the effects of cannibalization and its importance has been established in the literature, especially, since an assessment of the expected cannibalization effect of a new product can help in deciding on suitable times for new product introduction and promotions. However, quantitative measures that can be easily monitored and interpreted are not commonly available.Design/methodology/approach – This study uses parametric measures to help identify and investigate the effects of cannibalization. It proposes a predictive framework that may be used to investigate the effects of cannibalization. A case study, with real data from a consumer beverage company, illustrates the practical applicability of the model.Findings – The parametric measures developed helped to identify the level of product cannibalization at the product, product group, family and brand levels in the portfolio.Originality/value – Marketing strategists who can identify the victims of cannibalization in the product...

Identifying the effects of cannibalization on the product portfolio

Globalization is placing pressure on firms to gain competitive advantages. As firms become agile, it is important that they become agile quicker than other firms. More sooner have firms improved processes and gained efficiencies and so have other firms. Firms are in a race to be better or are at risk of becoming less competitive. Firms have embarked on business process management (BPM) initiatives to gain competitive advantages. BPM initiatives have received much attention, however little work has been done in attempting to make the BPM initiatives themselves efficient. When firms invest in resources such as people, time, money, newer technologies, etc., they expect to see returns on these benefits in realistic time periods; however in most cases, BPM initiatives have been criticized to take too long. A hybrid soft and hard systems approach is proposed to allow early extraction of critical business process, which when improved, will lead to quicker benefits. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A Soft and Hard Systems Approach to Business Process Management

Innovative products and services were created using a combination of consumer-idealized design (CID) and market research. CID played a significant role by providing out-of-box thinking, with new design concepts and ideas. Stakeholder participation and input from the first CID session and the application of field research helped with developing knowledge and understanding regarding stakeholder needs and desires. This in turn provided guidelines to perfect concepts and more advantageously to position and promote new product and service offerings. In addition, an effective validation and feedback system for the product and service designs were created using CID participants for the second time in tandem with focus groups, individual in-depth interviews and test marketing. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Patrick J. Robinson

Papers

Systems approach to knowledge development for creating new products and services