The Reality of Business Reengineering: Pacific Bell's Centrex Provisioning Process

Abstract

Business process reengineering (BPR), a recently popularized management change strategy, promises radical improvements in the business processes of an organization. This article describes and analyzes one of Pacific Bell's successful reengineering initiatives, the Centrex reengineering project. It suggests that successful reengineering implementation does not necessarily meet the popular assumptions underlying BPR. Reengineering designs tend to be radical and assume change to be clean slate, process-based, top-down directed, and information technology enabled. By contrast, reengineering implementation tends to involve improvements that are incremental, rather than radical. The key to implementation appears to be a continual involvement of front-line employees and managers.