The goal became 'achieving Wall-Street-sexy cost reductions' instead of the overhaul of basic processes, says Ed Constantine, chairman of Simpler, a consulting firm in Ottumwa, Iowa.Ĭompanies must find new markets, new sources of revenue. The basic idea, as Michael Hammer and James Champy expressed it in their 1993 manifesto Reengineering the Corporation, was 'the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and speed.' Whether you were focusing on the production line, the sales organization, or performance-review systems, went the reengineering mantra, you were not constrained by the existing process design or by market forcesindeed, by altering, even obliterating, designs and slashing costs, you could revolutionize your organization.įor all those lofty ambitions, in practice reengineering too often became a rationalization for downsizing staff, demoralizing employees, and ignoring corporate culture. And rarely did a single employee monitor an entire process so that he could, for example, pinpoint exact delivery dates for customers.Īgainst such a backdrop, process reengineering seemed bold and exhilarating. Each unit might have its own process for purchasing, accounts payable, or expense analysis.

A company's units and functions often operated almost as though they were independent silos, with little attempt to coordinate efforts among them. When reengineering first appeared during the economic slowdown of the early 1990s, many firms hadn't tackled the problems of redundancy in their organizations.

Hammer champy