Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) enables an organization to evaluate current processes with the goal of radically and structurally revising those processes to accommodate changing organizational needs and goals. BPR can dramatically enhance a business' competitive performance in a variety of ways: increased efficiency, improved profitability, better management and distribution of resources and better deployment of people and their knowledge. Equally important, a successful BPR initiative can result in a more challenging and rewarding culture in the workplace. Unfortunately BPR studies are difficult, expensive and time-consuming. Worse, it is estimated (Hammer and Stanton 95) that two thirds of BPR efforts either cost more than they save, are never implemented satisfactorily, and/or fail to meet their hoped-for outcomes. As Hammer and Stanton point out, people play a fundamental role in the success of any redesign of business practice, and one of the major reasons for the low success rate of BPR initiatives, (and a serious shortcoming in existing BPR support tools) is the failure to take this ``human factor'' into account:
A key issue in the preliminary stages of a BPR project is the ability to communicate and to share views and ideas among the participants of the (possibly distributed) project teams. At this time a consultant will conduct a cycle of interviews and analysis and formalisation sessions. This process requires the involvement of people from the client organisation who will have varying backgrounds, skills, roles and responsibilities. A participative approach to this phase of a BPR study, facilitating inter-functional communication and the sharing of concepts among people with diverse culture, experience and business background is of fundamental importance for the chances of success.
During the period when new processes as designed by the BPR team are being implemented, peoples' roles and responsibilities will be changing, as will their skills and information requirements. There is a danger in BPR that the new process will fail at this point, owing to inadequate support for and management of the change.
Once a new business process has been implemented, its continuing successful performance depends on ongoing management, sustained motivation and reliable performance evaluation techniques.
In order to provide a credible baseline against which to assess the project's success in these respects, the consultant partners and end users will evaluate from past experience the expected time and costs of the BPR to be undertaken in this project so it can be contrasted with the actual results achieved. This task will be complicated by the fact that in the process of developing a new toolset, time will be given over to evaluating the software and approach as well as to BPR itself.
Equally importantly, there are ethical considerations associated with re-organisation of business practice since the lives of real people are strongly affected by change. The INSPIRE project will develop a support tool and associated methodology which will address these issues, by providing real help with all stages of the BPR process, and incorporating extensive new features to take account of the human factor as outlined above. The consortium includes two BPR consultancy partners, who besides being skilful process engineers also provide expertise and experience in these human aspects, ethics, cultural changes, change management etc..
The fundamental target of the INSPIRE project is to dramatically increase the chances of organisations undertaking successful, cost-effective and fair BPR activities. This overall goal is not a quantifiable objective, although it is easy to see that if the INSPIRE tool can make the difference between success and failure, the potential impact of INSPIRE is huge. More specific and quantifiable business and technical objectives can be set out as follows:
We take as a reference a ``typical'' BPR study, with costs realistically estimated by appeal to i). the consortium partners who have extensive experience in BPR (the consortium includes two large industrial end-user partners, two management consultancies, specialists in process re-engineering, and two software developer partners with extensive experience of developing major industrial decision support applications); ii). a survey conducted through the World-Wide BPR forum; and iii). real cases reported in the literature (see for example Hammer & Champy 94). In what follows, labour rates are estimated at 10KEURO per man month and consultant rates at 15KEURO per man month.
Analysis requires an extensive programme of interviews, consolidation and feedback sessions, drawing people together from all aspects of the business organisation. Given a (modest) project team of 5-10 senior people, this process might easily require 20 man-months of effort. Similarly, the analysis of re-design options might involve comparable levels of effort, and often real-life trials as well. The INSPIRE tool will reduce this costs by 25% and will result in savings of 100 KEURO. Typically, consultants might be involved in these processes for between 1 and 3 man months, representing costs to the customer of between 15 and 45 KEURO, so a 25% reduction will result in savings of consultancy time worth between 3.75 and 11.25 KEURO per project, which, for a consultancy handling 50 jobs a year, this constitutes savings of between 187.5 KEURO and 506 KEURO.
A (successful) BPR initiative might result in savings of 1 MEURO per annum, and could take 1 year to complete (very often they are considerably longer than this). The INSPIRE tool and approach will allow a similar BPR project to be undertaken in 9 months, resulting in a saving of 250 KEURO.
Commissioning Executive Information Systems or Workflow projects might cost approx. 200 KEUROs, and might require significant internal investment of human resources (possibly 6 man months). INSPIRE will lay specific focus on this issue to enable 25% savings in this respect, corresponding to 65 KEUROs.
This goal is not directly quantifiable, but in this respect INSPIRE will meet a very real industrial need: Increasingly, BPR consultants receive low fees and payment-by-results for long projects. So since INSPIRE will reduce consulting costs, shorten BPR lifecycles and decrease BPR risks, the number of projects undertaken will rise, redressing the problem.
The INSPIRE tool will incorporate features specifically designed to allow non-specialists to model processes in the tool, and to speed up the process of creating these process models for all users. It will achieve this by providing a multi-lingual (at least English and Italian will be supported in the first prototype) dialogue/menu-driven interface to the model editors (fuller description appears in section 1 ``Innovation''). The consortium uses two benchmarks against which to quantify achievement of this latter objective:
INSPIRE will support an extensive and complete description of the human factor. At the process analysis stage, for example, it will not only support the description of processes and resources, but also a model of the human skill requirements for performing certain tasks, and the existing skills available in-house for executing such tasks. Similarly, at the process design stage it will provide a description of the skills needed to perform a newly designed process and to identify gaps in actual skills availability and skills development needs. As a benchmark, the INSPIRE system will identify a leading commercial skills modeling and assessment package (possibly HAYES), and will model/represent a similar range of attributes (numbering approximately 80) relating to skills capacity.
The INSPIRE consortium includes two established BPR consultancies. A common observation shared by these consultants is that non-specialists do not find it easy to understand the formal aspects of BPR or BPR support tools. INSPIRE has several specific goals concerned with rendering the BPR lifecycle and IT support intuitive and easily comprehensible to non-experts. In order to set up quantitative benchmarks for success in these respects, the consultants will between them compile an extensive questionnaire, based on existing questionnaires which are used already, both to guide the development of these features and to provide a structured method with which to gather and assess user feedback with respect to the following 3 goals:
Support for BPR implementation and change management Successful BPR does not end with the definition and acceptance of a ``to-be'' process. INSPIRE will provide active support for the definition of an Implementation Plan, detailing tasks and activities for real employees, and with time and resources allocation, to implement the new process. Equally important is a ``Change Management Plan'', giving support for the entire change process, including personnel requirements, training programmes, and a framework (including critical dependencies, milestones) for monitoring the new process once in place.
Certain features cited above rely on the compilation of certain BPR resources: the icons for the intuitive representation need to be designed and stored; the qualitative reasoning is driven by business rules which need to be compiled, and the implementation planner will exploit a database of BPR best practice cases (details of these features appear in section 1 ``Innovation''). The INSPIRE software platform will include a database repository for these resources. The idea is that over time, more and more such features can be included, so that the value and scope of the tool increases with use. During the lifetime of the project, the objective is to compile and store at least 50 BPR cases, 100 icons and 200 business rules. Note that these icons will cover both pilot centres and all the processes analysed and re-engineered during the project. It is not therefore expected that a non-specialist will be expected to be familiar with all 100 of these.
To summarise, the aims of INSPIRE are to design and build a BPR tool to provide real help in the modeling and re-designing of business processes, and real help in managing the adoption of the new process, incorporating extensive support for the human factor in its many aspects as outlined here. By far the most significant objective is to provide an intelligent environment in which the change in business culture and practice which necessarily accompanies a successful BPR initiative can be managed and encouraged through the complete lifecycle of the BPR effort.