5.5.4 A Soft Systems Methodology to Support Business Process Change Towards Concurrent Engineering

This paper discusses the fundamental commonality of ‘total quality management’ (TQM) and ‘business process reengineering’ (BPR) that originates from their roots in ‘systems thinking’. The authors draw on the same ‘systems thinking’ origin to develop a new soft systems methodology known as the Boardman Soft System Methodology (BSSM). The BSSM has been evolved specifically for modelling business processes to support change management initiatives such as BPR and TQM. Evidence is given in a case study which reports on improving the use of concurrent engineering (CE) tenets in a medium-sized engineering firm.

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