Top 11 Business Process Reengineering Interview Questions You Must Prepare 19.Mar.2024

For now we only offer the service to dealers who use Autologica DMS or Autologica Sky DMS (cloud-based version) as their dealer management system. It is vital that the dealer's software system be flexible in order to reflect all of the dealer's business processes. Autologica has that flexibility; we cannot guarantee that of other systems.

Business process reengineering is defined by Michael Hammer, originator of the expression, as The fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of an entire business system -- the business processes, jobs, organizational structures, management systems, values, and beliefs -- to achieve dramatic improvements in critical measures of performance.

1 This statement gives rise to a theorem of BPR and three corollaries.

The theorem is this:

there is nothing more to BPR than that statement. It is the definition, objectives, purposes, products, and methods of BPR. Everything else that is said or written is just examples. BPR is nothing more than the recognition that others are doing it much better than you, and they are doing it in a radically different way. To get much better, you have to get radical, and that me throwing out a lot of old values and beliefs that are in your way. BPR is not a cookbook approach to radical improvement, but rather a recognition that radical improvement is possible and a commitment to do what it takes to go after it.

The first corollary is that reengineering is like winning. There are as many ways to win as there are sports, teams playing those sports, and games played by those teams. There are as many ways to reengineer processes and rethink systems and values as there are organizations, processes in those organizations, and problems with those processes. You can get back to fundamentals; pull some razzle-dazzle; practice, practice, practice; publish a new play book; rethink the nature of the game; borrow from others; or invent something new.

The critical thing is to think like a winner:

believe that radical improvement is possible. The second corollary is that BPR is a personality multiplier. There is a Star Trek episode where some alien force has magnified all the deeply-repressed parts of the crew members' personalities. Sulu is roaming the corridors stripped to the waist challenging people with a saber, Uhura is depressed by fears over growing old, Scotty is waxing lachrymose, and Spock is too busy with romantic poetry to serve as science officer.

Reengineering can be like that alien force. The call for radical change gives people 3 important. Bottom-line types use it as an excuse to cut employee benefits and organizationdevelopment types use it as an occasion to put forward work/life issues. Left brain people want to base change on detailed data collection and statistical analysis and right-brain people want to do all the things they've always known were right but couldn't prove with numbers. Workaholics want to fire everyone who expects holidays and vacations and technical people want to solve all the problems with information systems. Some people reengineer to make the organization better for their shareholders, some for their employees, and some to make it better for the world.

Reengineering is a chance to examine conflicting values and priorities, select the ones that are appropriate, and reject the ones that have outlived their usefulness. But be wary of anyone that tells you they know what values and beliefs are right for your organization. The third corollary is that allowing people to follow their natural tendencies when doing reengineering will not produce radical change, it will produce amplified sameness. If you are going to change values and beliefs, the people charged with doing that have to study alternatives: other ways of organizing, managing, controlling, working, reporting, rewarding, measuring, and thinking about the work of the organization.

Business Process Reengineering can be performed for the following departments:

  • Finance & Administration
  • Parts
  • Service
  • Vehicle sales

Business process reengineering is defined by Michael Hammer, originator of the expression, as The fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of an entire business system -- the business processes, jobs, organizational structures, management systems, values, and beliefs -- to achieve dramatic improvements in critical measures of performance. 1 This statement gives rise to a theorem of BPR and three corollaries.

The theorem is this: there is nothing more to BPR than that statement. It is the definition, objectives, purposes, products, and methods of BPR. Everything else that is said or written is just examples. BPR is nothing more than the recognition that others are doing it much better than you, and they are doing it in a radically different way. To get much better, you have to get radical, and that me throwing out a lot of old values and beliefs that are in your way. BPR is not a cookbook approach to radical improvement, but rather a recognition that radical improvement is possible and a commitment to do what it takes to go after it. The first corollary is that reengineering is like winning.

There are as many ways to win as there are sports, teams playing those sports, and games played by those teams. There are as many ways to reengineer processes and rethink systems and values as there are organizations, processes in those organizations, and problems with those processes. You can get back to fundamentals; pull some razzle-dazzle; practice, practice, practice; publish a new play book; rethink the nature of the game; borrow from others; or invent something new. The critical thing is to think like a winner: believe that radical improvement is possible. The second corollary is that BPR is a personality multiplier. There is a Star Trek episode where some alien force has magnified all the deeply-repressed parts of the crew members' personalities.

Sulu is roaming the corridors stripped to the waist challenging people with a saber, Uhura is depressed by fears over growing old, Scotty is waxing lachrymose, and Spock is too busy with romantic poetry to serve as science officer. Reengineering can be like that alien force. The call for radical change gives people 3 important. Bottom-line types use it as an excuse to cut employee benefits and organizationdevelopment types use it as an occasion to put forward work/life issues.

Left brain people want to base change on detailed data collection and statistical analysis and right-brain people want to do all the things they've always known were right but couldn't prove with numbers. Workaholics want to fire everyone who expects holidays and vacations and technical people want to solve all the problems with information systems. Some people reengineer to make the organization better for their shareholders, some for their employees, and some to make it better for the world.

Reengineering is a chance to examine conflicting values and priorities, select the ones that are appropriate, and reject the ones that have outlived their usefulness. But be wary of anyone that tells you they know what values and beliefs are right for your organization. The third corollary is that allowing people to follow their natural tendencies when doing reengineering will not produce radical change, it will produce amplified sameness. If you are going to change values and beliefs, the people charged with doing that have to study alternatives: other ways of organizing, managing, controlling, working, reporting, rewarding, measuring, and thinking about the work of the organization.

Process reengineering focuses on improving the department's business processes. It does not include training in the use of Autologica DMS. We do offer training in the different modules outside the scope of a Business Process Reengineering project.

First you need a diagnosis. Is your organization sick? Is it terminal? What illness does it have? Heart disease and cancer have different recovery regimes: heart disease requires reducing stress, cutting fat and cholesterol, and getting moderate exercise, while cancer requires foods and vitamins that boost the immune system and frequent checkups. Here are some common organizational maladies and the recommended treatments.

Many people have used it that way (especially bottom-line types: see the second corollary), but that is not what true BPR is really about. BPR often allows the reduction of head count in certain areas. However, if done correctly, BPR increases the ability of employees to add value, making it rewarding for the organization to use the displaced people in other areas of endeavor. If it isn't done right, downsizing can kill the organization by asking fewer people to do the same work, resulting in overtime costs, stress, increased health care costs, low morale, low quality, and costly employee turnover.

It includes all processes that are related to the management system. There are likely other processes that are not related to the scope of software system; these are not included in the project.

  1. Management systems. This country is experiencing a management crisis. For the last two hundred years, our productivity in making and moving things has been going up, and that increase is what fueled the prosperity of the 50s, 60s, and early 70s. But today, 75% of the cost of goods is not in making them, but in managing information. Fully 75% of our work force is knowledge workers. The productivity of knowledge work is going down, not up, and that decline is what is fueling today's recession. We don't even know how to measure knowledge work productivity. It is not number of pages typed or keystrokes captured or letters written or purchase orders processed or invoices paid. It is the amount of labor required to purchase things, approve things, plan and schedule things, budget things, track things. That measure of productivity is reduced everytime we add a new control process or management system.
  2. Information. The organization works on information. Traditional management information systems grew up based on two facts: Information had to be communicated verbally or on paper Some people had to have detailed information about a small area of work and others had to have big-picture information about the whole organization. In the traditional organization, no one could handle enough information to make detailed decisions that met the strategic goals of the organization without a lot of direction. So management hierarchies grew up, with the layers serving as filters and amplifiers of information. Today the opposite is true. Things are changing so fast that we don't have time for things to flow up and down. But electronic information systems can provide instant access to all the information needed to make strategic decisions or take front-line action. The modern model has to be that of the orchestra, the hospital, or the Catholic Church. A symphony orchestra has as many as 350 people under one conductor; a patient care team may have 20 or 30 professionals working as a self-managed team; and the Catholic Church 5 administers 6 million parishioners world wide with 4 layers of management. These systems work because everyone knows what the objective is and has the same sheet of music, the same patient chart, or the same bible to work from. Give people the information they need and point them in the right direction.
  3. People. If traditional control systems are too slow and too expensive, we need to replace them. Most high-performance organizations have found that the most effective replacement is employee trust and empowerment. Give people the ability to focus outward on customer needs and overall organization aims, and they will. Management is basically about the control of variances. Deming's revolution in production-floor quality was to put the tools, information, and authority to control variances as close to where they occur as possible. Doing the same for knowledge work not only produces better control than top-down management, it is also the only way to increase the productivity of knowledge workers. 

No. and yes. The TQM process is not the same as the BPR process. A lot of people who want to think they are doing reengineering say it is the same thing as TQM. They are really doing incremental process improvement, not radical reengineering. TQM is not set up to handle the really radical changes of reengineering. However, bringing TQM into the organization and doing it successfully requires all six of the kinds of radical change that BPR is looking for, and therefore successful implementation of TQM is an ideal example of what it me to reengineer.

Doing TQM incorrectly can also be a perfect example of what can go wrong if reengineering is done incorrectly. TQM is not a set of processes. Many organizations have adopted TQM processes, either in place of or in addition to their traditional processes, and after a few years taken them out, finding they were too expensive and they couldn't afford them. The reason the procedures prove too expensive is that the organizations don't adopt the attitudes and beliefs of TQM.

TQM says "I no longer think that everything can be perfect and will be with enough planning and direction from above. I now believe that everything can get better, and will if I empower people on the front lines to make everything the best they can." Empowerment me giving them the tools, the authority, and the information to measure quality and take action to improve it. It requires changing values, beliefs, and management systems. Only doing part of reengineering without being willing to give up some fundamental beliefs can cost money and productivity.

Make no mistake, BPR is not for everyone. As the TQM and downsizing examples show, trying to make fundamental change can be expensive, and if not successful the cash drain or adverse impact on productivity can make the organization fail. BPR is aggressive treatment that can kill the patient. It is not only fixing the symptoms, but involves surgery, invasive therapy, and changes in lifestyle.

Don't enter into BPR if what your organization has is a common cold:

only do it if you have heart disease, cancer, or some other life-threatening illness. But the fact is, most government agencies do have a life-threatening disease. We're facing shrinking budgets. We have been mandated with dramatic reductions in administrative expenses. Do you really know how much it costs you to perform your processes? One institution I worked with found that their average cost to process a purchase order was $100, and the average value was only $200: 33% of their procurement costs were in their own pap.