GLOBAL BUSINESS PROCESS RE-ENGINEERING: A SYSTEM DYNAMICS BASED APPROACH

This paper presents a structured approach for Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) in a large (global) corporation. The paper defines BPR, explores the principles and assumptions behind Re-engineering, looks for common factors behind its successes or failures. In order to overcome the potential failures, we propose to view a global business as a system and use the System Dynamics methodology (Forrester (1961)) in conjunction with Analytical Hierarchy Network Process (Saaty (1996)). This approach will enable corporations to understand the relationships among the components of a global business and link different sub-systems properly when a Re-engineering process is taking place. The purpose of this approach is to increase the effectiveness of the Re-engineering process.