Business Process Re-engineering and Human Resource Management

Personnel Review

Volumn 23, Issue 3, 1994, Pages 34-46

  Willmott, Hugh ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 21844524383     PISSN: 00483486     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1108/00483489410064559     Document Type: Review

References (24)

1. Oliver, J., “Shocking to the Core”, Management Today, August 1993, pp. 18–23.
2. Peters, T.J. and Waterman, R.H., In Search of Excellence: Lessons From America's Best Run Companies, Harper and Row, New York, NY, 1982. For a critique of this literature, see Willmott, H.C., “Strength Is Ignorance; Slavery is Freedom: Managing Culture in Modern Organizations”, Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 30 No. 4, 1993, pp. 515–53.
3. See, for example, Oakland, J., Total Quality Management, Heinemann, London, 1990.
4. For a critical examination of the theory and practice of quality initiatives, see Wilkinson, A. and Willmott, H.C., Making Quality Control, Routledge, London (in press).
5. Oates, D., “Buzz Words: Learning the Language of Business”, Accountancy, August 1993, p. 38.
6. Hammer, M., “Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate”, Harvard Business Review, July-August, Vol. 67 No. 4, 1990, p. 104–112.
7. See Hammer, M. and Champy, B., Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, Nicholas Brearley, London, 1993, especially Chapters 2 and 5. Its creator, Michael Hammer is a former Professor of Computer Science, now president of Hammer and Company, consultants.
8. Hayes, R.H. and Jaikumar, R., “Manufacturing's Crisis: New Technologies, Obsolete Organisations”, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 65 No. 5, 1988, pp. 77–85.
9. Since the term was coined by Hammer[6], articles and books on business process re-engineering have mushroomed. See, for example, Morris, D. and Brandon, J., Re-engineering Your Business, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY, 1993. Since these books are frequently derivative as well as repetitive, I focus upon Hammers's original Harvard Business Review article[6], and his subsequent book with Champy[7].
10. Articles that attempt to elucidate BPR include Barton, S.B., “Business Process Engineering”, Business Quarterly, Vol. 57 No. 3, 1993, pp. 101–7 and Rigby, D., “The Secret History of Process Reengineering”, Planning Review, Vol. 21 No. 2, 1993, pp. 24–7.
11. Johansson, H.J., McHugh, P., Pendlebury, A.J. and Wheeler, W.A., Business Process Reengineering, John Wiley, London, 1993.
12. Direct writing insurance dispenses with old forms of insurance distribution. A large sales force in the field is replaced by carefully targeted advertising and telephone sales. ICTs are used intensively to give real time personalized quotations, to reduce and refine underwriting risks and to analyse and predict responses to advertising. This latter use of ICT allows a highly flexible use of part-time labour to cover peaks in work flow.
13. See Hammer's comments in James, M., “Hammering Home the BPR Message”, Management Consultancy, July 1993, pp. 47–52. See also comments on the effects of “Core Process Redesign”, the McKinsey equivalent of BPR, in Browning, J., “The Power of Process Redesign”, The McKinsey Quarterly, No. 1, 1993, pp. 47–58, where it is claimed that there is no place for middle managers.
14. Marx, K., Capital, Vol. 1, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976, p. 464 et seq. The collective worker is constructed by capital, or its managerial agents, as control over the labour process passes from those with craft skills to others — today, the managers and consultants – who currently exert the greatest influence over questions of how human skill and technologies are to be identified, valued and combined to secure the reproduction of private accumulation.
15. Kanter, R.M., When Giants Learn to Dance: Mastering the Challenges of Strategy Management, and Careers in the 1990s, Routledge, London, 1992, p. 91 and p. 116.
16. Burns, T. and Stalker, G.N., The Management of Innovations, Tavistock Publications, London, 1961.
17. Quoted in Thackray, J., “Fads, Fixes and Fictions”, Management Today, June 1993, p. 41.
18. Reich, R.B., The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism, Simon and Schuster, London, 1991.
19. Grey, C. and Mitev, N., “Reengineering Organizations: Towards a Critical Appraisal”, working paper, School of Business and Economic Studies, University of Leeds.
20. See Keenoy, T. and Anthony, P., “HRM : Metaphor, Meaning and Morality” in Blyton, P. and Turnbull, P. (Eds), Reassessing Human Resource Management, Sage, London, 1992.
21. Hosseini, J., “Revisiting and Expanding Taylorism: Business Process Redesign and Information Technology”, Computers and Industrial Engineering, Vol. 25 No. 1, 1993, pp. 533–5.
22. Hall, G., Rosenthal, J. and Wade, J., “How To Make Re-engineering Really Work” Harvard Business Review, November-December 1993, pp. 119–31.
23. For example, the implementation of these systems makes it possible to monitor the speed and accuracy of the case managers’ work.
24. Business International, The Management Network Revolution: How Innovative Firms Are Getting Results From Flatter Organisations, Business International, London, 1993, p. 11.