Guest Editorial: Business Process Reengineering: An Analysis Perspective

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) has arguably been the most popular and sweeping change management approach of the past decade. The widespread attention, indeed hype, surrounding BPR can, at least partly, be attributed to the fact that BPR advocates an alternative perspective on how businesses should be studied and improved. Accordingly, businesses should not be analyzed in terms of the functions in which they can be decomposed or in terms of the products they produce, but in terms of the key business processes that they perform. As opposed to the traditional functional-based or product-based decomposition of an organization, a business process is a dynamic ordering of work activities across time and place, with a beginning, an end, and clearly identified inputs and outputs. Processes are generally independent of formal organizational structure and may involve the cooperation of different functions, divisions, business units, and may even span across entire organizations. The shift from functional-based to process-based organizational design has been said to constitute a major paradigm shift in business and management science and therefore BPR has been characterized as a business revolution by its early advocates (Hammer, 1990; Davenport and Short, 1990). In order to support industry and academe with substantive literature on BPR, the International Journal of Flexible Manufacturing Systems has commissioned a series of special issues that are dedicated to Business Process Reengineering. The three issues of the series refer to the Design, Modeling, and Analysis aspects of BPR, respectively (Irani, Hlupic, and Giaglis, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c). The articles contained in this, third and final, of these issues concentrate primarily on the Analysis aspect of BPR projects.