Reengineering Is Reengineering Just Another

Reengineering

Is reengineering just another fad or does it offer something of lasting value?

Business process reengineering is the redesign of organizational workflows to maximize efficiency. "Functionally reengineering calls for rediscovering the objectives of a business, diagnosing ills and discovering new paths to the objectives, design of a process, and then its implementation. It is supposed to transform not only what is done but how it is done, thus to change the corporate culture" (Reengineering 2011, INC). While aspects of reengineering clearly harkened back to the 'scientific management' approach of the turn of the 20th century, the philosophy of the transformation of the corporate culture was supposed to be radically new.

However, many criticized 'reengineering' as simply creating a trendy buzzword for what was in a long line of corporate fads, including zero-based budgeting (which shared reengineering's concept of total company redesign from-the-ground-up), so-called 'intrapreneuring,' (re)visioning, de-massing, and de-layering (Reengineering 2011, INC). Furthermore, "much older management approaches tied more directly to operational practices were embedded in the reengineering methodology or used in its implementation, including total quality management (TQM), [and Six Sigma] continuous improvement" (Reengineering 2011, INC). Reengineering seemed particularly indebted to Toyota's Just in Time (JIT) manufacturing and delivering system; Toyota's philosophy of creating a lean corporation using operational clustering; and Toyota's cross-training of employees to minimize waste and downtime. Reengineering also drew from GM's and Motorola's Six Sigma philosophy of quality control and zero defects.

However, in stark contrast to JIT and Six Sigma, reengineering never became a 'brand name' strategy, as manifest in the fact that it is referred to with a small 'r.' Perhaps the fairest criticism of reengineering is that it never became a coherent philosophy. Less than a fad, it became a generic term for process improvement, perhaps because of the commonness of the name 'reengineering,' which could be applied to any of the previously existing managerial philosophies and approaches that pre-dated its birth. Even its advocates admitted that "by the mid-2000s reengineering has largely lost its violent language and radical character. It has become a generic label for making change in organizations" (Reengineering 2011, INC).

Reengineering is not accompanied by a specific methodology of "statistical quality control" like Six Sigma, and virtually any organizational change can be labeled reengineering "large restructurings in industry leading to mass lay-offs, off-shorings, and out-sourcings" which may not necessarily lead to the maximization of organizational efficiency in the long run, but merely result in short-term profits. Reengineering has become a way for almost any desired change to sound like a process improvement, no matter how hasty, ill-advised or self-serving on the part of management. In contrast, previous approaches like JIT, Six Sigma and TQM had to be justified in a highly methodological and coherent fashion, according to a pre-determined organizational grid.