Is Business Process Reengineering a Fad or Lasting Value?
This paper examines the concept of business process reengineering (BPR) and evaluates whether it represents a genuine and lasting contribution to management thought or merely another corporate fad. The paper traces reengineering's intellectual debts to earlier methodologies — including Toyota's Just in Time manufacturing, Six Sigma, and Total Quality Management — while acknowledging criticisms that reengineering lacks a coherent, proprietary methodology. It concludes that although reengineering offers useful flexibility and a ground-up rethinking of organizational processes, it has failed to deliver the paradigm-shifting impact of the structured management philosophies it drew upon.
- Introduction: Defining Business Process Reengineering: Defines BPR and its cultural transformation aims
- Reengineering's Roots and Its Predecessors: Links reengineering to JIT, TQM, and Six Sigma
- Criticisms: A Fad Without a Coherent Philosophy: Argues reengineering became a generic buzzword
- Lack of Methodology Compared to Six Sigma and TQM: Contrasts BPR's vagueness with rigorous frameworks
- Arguments in Favor of Reengineering: Acknowledges flexibility and ground-up rethinking benefits
- Conclusion: Reengineering lacks paradigm-shifting impact of peers
✍️ How to write this paper — guide, tools & examples ▾
What makes this paper effective
- The paper takes a clear, evaluative stance — asking whether reengineering is a fad — and pursues that question consistently throughout, weighing both criticisms and merits.
- It situates reengineering within a broader intellectual history, comparing it to named, established methodologies (JIT, Six Sigma, TQM) to highlight what it lacks rather than simply asserting weakness.
- The concession paragraph acknowledging reengineering's flexibility strengthens the argument by demonstrating balanced reasoning rather than one-sided dismissal.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates comparative analysis as an argumentative tool. By measuring reengineering against well-defined peer methodologies — especially Six Sigma's statistical rigor and Toyota's JIT system — the author gives the critique concrete grounding rather than relying on abstract claims about vagueness.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a definition of reengineering and its stated ambitions, then surveys the management traditions it borrowed from. The central section develops the main criticism — that reengineering lacks methodological coherence and became a generic label. A brief counterargument acknowledging its flexibility follows, before the conclusion reaffirms that reengineering has not produced a lasting paradigm shift.
Introduction: Defining Business Process Reengineering
Business process reengineering is the fundamental redesign of organizational workflows to maximize efficiency. "Functionally, reengineering calls for rediscovering the objectives of a business, diagnosing its ills and discovering new paths to those objectives, designing a process, and then implementing it. It is supposed to transform not only what is done but how it is done, thus changing 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 transforming corporate culture was intended to be radically new.
Reengineering's Roots and Its Predecessors
Many critics characterized reengineering as simply a trendy buzzword 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," revisioning, 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 delivery system, Toyota's philosophy of creating a lean corporation through 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.
Criticisms: A Fad Without a Coherent Philosophy
In stark contrast to JIT and Six Sigma, reengineering never became a brand-name strategy — a fact reflected in the convention of writing it with a lowercase "r." Perhaps the fairest criticism of reengineering is that it never coalesced into a coherent philosophy. Rather than establishing itself as a distinct movement, it became a generic term for process improvement — in part because the word "reengineering" is broad enough to be applied to any of the pre-existing managerial philosophies it drew upon. 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).
Conclusion
Reengineering offers some lasting utility as a flexible, adaptable approach to organizational improvement, but its very flexibility has proved to be its greatest weakness. Without the statistical rigor of Six Sigma or the operational discipline of JIT, it has remained too vague to stand as a coherent management philosophy. Over time, it has become little more than a convenient label — applicable to almost any organizational change, for better or worse. Compared to the structured methodologies it borrowed from, reengineering has failed to deliver an enduring paradigm shift in management thought.
References
Reengineering. (2011). INC. Retrieved February 20, 2011, from http://www.inc.com/encyclopedia/reengineering.htm
Create your account
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.