Business Process Reengineering: An Evaluation of Soft versus Hard

Abstract

As a future wave, organisations go for business process reengineering (BPR) to improve their profitability and performance while becoming flexible and easily fit into the new dynamic world. Digitalisation era comes with exponential IT transformation and brings people to always link business process reengineering and software (Soft) upgrade or IT revolution. This article discusses about the importance of the hardware reengineering over software reengineering in meeting the purpose of business process innovation in a company. Findings showed that business process reengineering is mostly about hardware transformation by means of business transactions between functional units and the business infrastructure compared to software engineering. 85% of participants agreed on the impact of hardware transformation in achieving BPR compared to software reengineering. In addition to hard and soft aspect of BPR, process as well as people are also critical for a successful BPR implementation. Software engineering constitutes an enabler for the implementation of hardware engineering. The article also emphasises on the key role played by people and process in fulfilling overall company' leadership approach.