Operations management and systemic modelling as frameworks for business process reengineering

Although there currently exists an unprecedented level of interest in business processes, focusing on their analysis, evaluation and reengineering, many business process reengineering (BPR) initiatives have yielded disappointing results. This paper suggests that one of the reasons for this might be the difficulty of intuitively grasping the full dynamic complexity of the processes and systems encountered. It is therefore proposed that current developments in systems thinking and continuous system simulation, when applied within the context of an operations management framework, may offer the prospect of improved success ratios in such BPR projects. The issue of supply chain dynamics and associated control problems is presented as an example in order to illustrate the potential power of this approach in the design of supplier interactions. A framework is also presented based on the classic ‘5Ps’ model of operations management, adapted with feedback loops and inertia elements to produce the basis of a part generic, high level, dynamic model from which specific BPR simulation studies may be constructed.