Business process re‐engineering: lessons from operations management

It has become clear that business process re‐engineering (BPR) draws on the knowledge and skills from many of the traditional management disciplines. The adoption of the process paradigm for managing enterprises creates new challenges of reconciling the relative roles of functions and processes within an organization. While these issues have yet to be resolved there are other aspects of BPR concerned with activities to improve performance which have many similarities with existing concepts and techniques in the domain of operations management. There is a danger that the learning gained in areas of quality management, just‐in‐time and simultaneous engineering may be disregarded or hidden from those engaged in BPR programmes. Aims to indicate and identify some of the lessons learned from operations management so that they may be applied to BPR.