Reengineering Quotes

Reengineering has captured the imagination of managers and shareholders alike, sending corporations on journeys of radical business redesign that have already begun to transfigure global industry. Yet aside from earning them improvements in their business performance, the shift into more-process-centered organizations is causing fundamental changes in the corporate world, changes that business leaders are only now beginning to understand. What will the revolutions final legacy be? (Michael Hammer)

We are trying to make up these other elements by gaining cost efficiencies through our reengineering process and through overt fund-raising activities to better support graduate education.

Charles M. Vest

Business process engineering aims to achieve the greatest efficiency possible in terms of business-organizational solutions. Organizational departments, reengineering project teams or even business process owners can be responsible for process engineering. While work schedule development for manufacturing processes might be institutionally allocated to a certain department for years as job preparation, other kinds of business processes are not quite as regimented.

August-Wilhelm Scheer

Reengineering is 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.

Michael Hammer

Business reengineering isn't about fixing anything. Business reengineering means starting all over, starting from scratch. Business reengineering means putting aside much of the received wisdom of two hundred years of industrial management,... How people and companies did things yesterday doesn't matter to the business reengineer.

Michael Hammer

THIS BOOK is not about reengineering; it is about reengineering's consequences, about its aftermath and its abiding legacy.

Michael Hammer

Reengineering posits a radical new principle: that the design of work must be based not on hierarchical management and the specialization of labor but on end-to-end processes and the creation of value for the customer.

Michael Hammer

Observing and performing the process is the best way to develop insight into it. However, the team must be vigilant about avoiding the temptation to overstudy. The goal must be to move quickly to redesign. Before concluding we should comment on another tool that is available to reengineering teams, namely benchmarking. Essentially, benchmarking means looking for the companies that are doing something best and learning how they do it in order to emulate them... Used this way, benchmarking is just a tool for catching up, not for jumping way ahead. Benchmarking can, however, spark ideas in the team-especially if teams use as their benchmarks companies from outside their own industries.

Michael Hammer

Reengineering cannot be planned meticulously and accomplished in small and cautious steps. It's an all-or-nothing proposition with an uncertain result.

Michael Hammer

Sadly, we must report that despite the success stories described in previous chapters, many companies that begin reengineering don't succeed at it... Our unscientific estimate is that as many as 50 to 70 percent of the organizations that undertake a reengineering effort do not achieve the dramatic results they intended.

Michael Hammer

In the early ‘80's, there was little interest in the idea of Enterprise Reengineering or Enterprise Modeling and the use of formalisms and models was generally limited to some aspects of application development within the Information Systems community. The subject of "architecture" was acknowledged at that time, however, there was little definition to support the concept. This lack of definition precipitated the initial investigation that ultimately resulted in the "Framework for Information Systems Architecture." Although from the outset, it was clear that it should have been referred to as a "Framework for Enterprise Architecture," that enlarged perspective could only now begin to be generally understood as a result of the relatively recent and increased, worldwide focus on Enterprise "engineering." (John Zachman)

Over the past decade, I have watched more than 100 companies try to remake themselves into significantly better competitors. They have included large organizations (Ford) and small ones (Landmark Communications), companies based in the United States (General Motors) and elsewhere (British Airways), corporations that were on their knees (Eastern Airlines), and companies that were earning good money ((Bristol-Myers Squibb). Their efforts have gone under many banners: total quality management, reengineering, right-sizing, restructuring, cultural change, and turnarounds. But, in almost every case, the basic goal has been the same: to make fundamental changes in how business is conducted in order to help cope with a new, more challenging market environment.

John Kotter