Re-engineering

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Re-engineering , also known as reengineering, is the engineering redesign of existing systems and structures or the replacement of an old system with a new one. It includes all methods and activities for adapting to changed environmental conditions.

history

The term “ reengineering ” was used by Michael Hammer in his 1990 article Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate . This article appeared under the heading Change Management .

“It is time to stop paving the cow paths. Instead of embedding outdated processes in silicon and software, we should obliterate them and start over. We should 'reengineer' our businesses: use the power of modern information technology to radically redesign our business processes in order to achieve dramatic improvements in their performance. ”

- Michael Hammer : Harvard Business Review July / August 1990

Almost at the same time a contribution by Thomas H. Davenport and James E. Short with the title Industrial Engineering: Information Technology and Business Process Redesign appeared .

“As we enter the 1990s, however, two newer tools are transforming organizations to the degree that Taylorism once did. These are information technology - the capabilities offered by computers, software applications, and telecommunications - and business process redesign - the analysis and design of work flows and processes within and between organizations. Working together, these tools have the potential to create a new type of industrial engineering, changing the way the discipline is practiced and the skills necessary to practice it. "

- Thomas H. Davenport, James E. Short : MIT Sloan Management Review, July 15, 1990

A short time later, Michael Hammer and James Champy published their book Reengineering the Corporation , which became a standard work. In it they describe business reengineering as “a fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of companies or essential company processes. The result is improvements by orders of magnitude in decisive, today important and measurable performance parameters in the areas of cost, quality, service and time ”. They divide business reengineering into six phases:

  1. Preliminary investigation of the goals, the business model and the processes of service provision
  2. Analysis of business processes based on qualitative and quantitative measurement criteria
  3. New process model with all core processes and auxiliary processes
  4. Implementation plan
  5. Continuous improvement process
  6. Renewed reengineering

In the 1980s, the Japanese economy drew attention to itself with its particularly powerful work processes. During this time, the US auto industry was in crisis. The concept of re-engineering should help to make the US economy internationally competitive again in a short time. German companies also recognized in the 1990s that they had to be completely reorganized in order to be internationally competitive. In the course of the increase in the performance of information and communication technology, reengineering gained in importance as software automated many routine activities that had previously been carried out manually.

methodology

Re-engineering is process-oriented, it models systems and structures, for example those of a company. The use of complex business planning software can result in a reorganization of business processes. This redesign is preceded by an identification and content analysis of the processes. In addition, it must be planned how these processes can be supported - for example through the use of mobile technologies. Partial activities may be omitted in the course of the modeling or new ones may be added. The methods of organizational reorganization of companies include reorganization, organizational development , learning organization and business reengineering. Re-engineering brings about an integration of tasks.

Business re-engineering

There are a variety of management concepts for restructuring companies. These include just in time, computer-integrated manufacturing , total quality management , process management , lean management , time-based management, segmentation or fractalization and business reengineering. Reengineering deals with fundamental changes to the architecture of systems and structures; it tends to make radical changes. This concept has two forms. Fitness management clarifies what needs to be restructured, change management deals with how the restructuring needs to take place. While the management of business processes takes place in an evolutionary way, re-engineering means the radical and short-term redesign of strategically relevant and cross-departmental core processes such as product development, corporate planning and logistics. Re-engineering brings a high degree of change in a short time, it is revolutionary, strives to redesign processes and is associated with high costs and high risks.

In a case study from the automotive industry, the re-engineering of product development has three dimensions:

  1. Functional departments become multifunctional development teams
  2. The reuse of existing parts is increased dramatically
  3. Virtualization of the product development process through the use of software-based systems

By means of re-engineering measures, the company's performance can decrease in the short term before it overcompensates for this negative effect in the long term. This is known as the " worse-before-better syndrome ". This syndrome can lead to discontinuing measures before they have their full positive effect.

Business reengineering has stimulated many changes in the management of organizations. This resulted in new management concepts such as cross-sectional organization, the management of supply chains and the active design of customer relationships through customer care . In addition, new instruments were developed, such as management information systems , ERP systems, systems for knowledge management , groupware and cooperative systems.

criticism

Critics of re-engineering argue that projects for re-engineering companies often do not achieve their goals. It has been observed that the results of re-engineering are at the expense of customer satisfaction. In addition, they would lead to massive layoffs of workers. Companies that use the re-engineering method to restructure themselves achieve the same operational performance with fewer employees. Nevertheless, half of all reengineering projects were considered to have failed in the mid-1990s.

Despite the great attention paid to the concept, it cannot live up to expectations. According to the critics, the reasons for this are:

  • The concept does not provide any convincing arguments for the assumption that the inefficiency of the processes is the cause of the inefficiency of companies.
  • Most of the time, the holistic processes are developed at the so-called green table without taking into account the existing processes and procedures (which is exactly the conceptual premise that Michael Hammer and James Champy demand).

Software re-engineering

Maintenance and re-engineering are distinguished from each other under the umbrella term software maintenance. In this perspective, re-engineering describes changes to software that improve its maintenance quality: "Maintenance qualities are properties of the software that have no direct influence on the quality from the perspective of a user, but only affect the developers and maintenance engineers". Maintenance projects include the modification of an already existing functionality, the expansion of the scope of functions, troubleshooting and porting. During re-engineering, a system is analyzed in order to identify components and to represent the system in a different form or on a higher level of abstraction.

In the early days of software reengineering, practice-oriented scientists were accused of ignoring the theory but also evading empirical validation. As an example, it was cited that many reengineering processes use heuristics to reconstruct structural information from old software. However, these heuristics always contained free parameters that would have to be calibrated on real old software. But this is only possible through empirical studies.

Re-engineering in technology

The re-engineering of systems, machines, assemblies or automation solutions aims to create or expand functionality with more modern means. It differs from reverse engineering in that the manufacturing documents are usually available or in that there is no secret copying. Rather, it is about a type of modernization through at least partial redesign. Re-engineering differs from redesigning in that it does not only change aesthetic features. However, the demarcation is not sharp.

literature

  • Michael Hammer, James Champy: Business Reengineering. The radical cure for the company. From the American by Patricia Künzel, Verlag Heyne, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-453-13220-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Hammer: Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate. Harvard Business Review, July 1990, accessed November 26, 2015 .
  2. ^ Thomas H. Davenport, James E. Short: The New Industrial Engineering: Information Technology and Business Process Redesign. MIT Sloan Management Review, July 15, 1990, accessed November 26, 2015 .
  3. ^ Norbert Thom, Michèle Etienne: Business Reengineering. (PDF) (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on March 1, 2011 ; Retrieved November 26, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / innopool.ch
  4. ↑ You are someone again . In: Der Spiegel . No. 11 , 1994 ( online ).
  5. ↑ Simon Head: The End of the Middle Class . In: Die Zeit , No. 18/1996
  6. ↑ Peter Zschunke: Locations: blueprints of globalization. In: Spiegel Online . August 17, 1999, accessed November 26, 2015 .
  7. ^ André Köhler, Volker Gruhn: Mobile Process Landscaping using the example of sales processes in the insurance industry. (PDF) Chair for Applied Telematics / e-Business University of Leipzig, accessed on November 26, 2015 (Chapter 2.4).
  8. ↑ Michaela Nüssel: Reorganization, Business Reengineering, Organizational Development and Learning Organization as Approaches to Organizational Design. (PDF) (No longer available online.) 1999, archived from the original on March 4, 2016 ; Retrieved November 26, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.economics.phil.uni-erlangen.de
  9. ↑ Reinhard Schütte: Process modeling in trading systems. (PDF) (No longer available online.) P. 7 f , archived from the original on May 16, 2011 ; Retrieved November 26, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.econbiz.de
  10. ↑ August-Wilhelm Scheer, Markus Nüttgens, Volker Zimmermann: Framework for an integrated business process management. (PDF) (No longer available online.) Universität Hamburg, p. 7 f , archived from the original on July 22, 2014 ; Retrieved November 25, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.wiso.uni-hamburg.de
  11. ↑ Michael Reiss: Reengineering: Radical Revolution or Realistic Reform? (PDF) University of Stuttgart, accessed on November 25, 2015 .
  12. ↑ E. Weimann, P. Weimann: From benchmarking to process improvement. (PDF) (No longer available online.) In: Pneumologe 2013. Prof. Beuth University, 2013, p. 3 f. , archived from the original on December 8, 2015 ; Retrieved November 25, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / prof.beuth-hochschule.de
  13. ↑ Craig Stephens, Thomas Klug: The iceberg phenomenon - From the importance of the invisible value drivers. (PDF) Retrieved November 25, 2015 .
  14. ↑ Tom Buser, Beat Welte, Thomas Wiederkehr: From company to customer company. (PDF) Retrieved November 26, 2015 (see foreword).
  15. ↑ Ludwig Nastansky: The productivity of groupware-based applications in workflow management. (PDF) In: Workgroup Computing Competence Center Paderborn. University of Paderborn, July 1995, accessed November 25, 2015 .
  16. ^ Uwe Jean Heuser: The last program . In: Die Zeit , No. 7/1996
  17. ↑ Dietmar H. Lamparter: Bad advice . In: Die Zeit , No. 45/1994
  18. ↑ If you don't sprint, you will be sold . In: Der Spiegel . No. 34 , 1997 ( online ).
  19. ↑ Uwe Jean Heuser: Ten years of hard work . In: Die Zeit , No. 39/1995; Interview with J. Champy
  20. ↑ Against anorexia . In: Der Spiegel . No. 12 , 1995 ( online ).
  21. ↑ Stefan Opferkuch, Jochen Ludewig: Software Maintenance - A Taxonomy. (PDF) University of Stuttgart, accessed on November 25, 2015 .
  22. ↑ Klaus Bothe, Ulrich Sacklowski: Practical relevance through reverse engineering projects : experiences and generalizations. (PDF) In: Software engineering in the classroom at SEUH 7. Horst Lichter, Martin Glinz, 2001, accessed on November 25, 2015 .
  23. ↑ Paul Feyerabend and software technology. (PDF) In: Informatik-Spektrum 21. 1998, pp. 273–276 , accessed on November 25, 2015 .
  24. ↑ Reinhard Jung: Economic factors in integration-oriented reengineering - distribution architecture and integration steps from an economic point of view. (PDF) (No longer available online.) In: Arbeitsberichte des Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik. July 1993, archived from the original on December 17, 2015 ; Retrieved on November 26, 2015 (work report No. 16). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.econbiz.de
  25. ↑ https://sciencing.com/what-is-the-difference-between-reverse-engineering-and-re-engineering-12749441.html What Is the Difference Between Reverse Engineering and Re-Engineering? on Sciencing , accessed Nov. 4, 2019