DESIGNING A COURSE ON BUSINESS PROCESS REENGINEERING (BPR): BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN BUSINESS OPERATIONS AND ENGINEERING OF SYSTEMS

摘要

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is a systematic approach to helping an organization analyze and improve its processes. All systems are designed, developed and engineered to support business processes. Therefore, an understanding of the business processes for engineering students is crucial to choosing how to build and manage systems. BPR was an important activity 1990s and there is a dramatic re-emergence of organizations' interest in the topic. At Stevens Institute of Technology we, at the under graduate program in Engineering Management felt the need to provide our students the bridge between the design and engineering of systems and business operations. As a result, the primary author was involved in the design, development, and now, the teaching of this course in the senior year. This paper will share the experiences of the author in designing such a course, its relevance to the engineering management undergraduate students, and future benefits to the potential employers of these undergraduate students. The course was offered in the Fall of 2006 for first time to the senior year Engineering Management students. Business Process Reengineering targets to achieve quantum improvements by rethinking and redesigning the way that business processes are carried out with the help of information technology (IT) as the primary facilitator. To remain competitive in today's global economy, there is an urgent need to rethink and transform the existing business processes for improved quality and efficiency, reduced costs, and increased profitability. This provides an opportunity to view the organization-wide processes from a systems perspective. A systems perspective focuses on looking at a set of problems as a whole and the context that creates the holistic view rather than looking at a set of problems as individually isolated events. The course called Business Process Reengineering -EM435 at Stevens is specially tailored to this need; it provides knowledge about BPR and its main concepts, the technologies and the strategies for implementing business transformation, and best practices on BPR. It emphasizes the role of BPR in managing technology and the engineering functions. The course covers the strategic, operational and technological aspects of BPR by relating it to quality improvement and Information Technology. It introduces the main concepts underlying the transformation of business processes, explains the enabling role of IT, and demonstrates the application of different tools to the redesign of business processes.