Business Process Re-engineering

In the early 1990s a new term started to appear amongst numerous IS publications — business process re-engineering (BPR). This was initially popularised by a number of influential articles published by Michael Hammer leading to a book of this title written by Hammer and Champy (1993). They define Business Process Re-engineering as: ‘The fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service and speed.’ At about the same time another influential, if more conservative book by Davenport and Short (1990), defined BPR as: The analysis and design of work flows and processes within and between organisations. ‘