A methodology for physical business process redesign on TQM viewpoints

Business process redesign (BPR) is very important in a competitive business environment. But literature suggests that a majority of BPR projects fail. It often falls into a trap that only takes a serious view of information sides between subsystems. Total quality management (TQM) has played an important role in business management for a decade and it's importance continues to grow. Regardless of where TQM principles are applied, TQM shares common viewpoints of the analysis through facility, employee, product, and customer. These viewpoints are very useful in redesigning any existing systems. We suggest a combined approach considering physical as well as informational side in regard to the four TQM viewpoints. This approach gives a new framework to redesign old systems. It proceeds strategic side BPR, informational side BPR, and physical side BPR. In this paper we focus on the physical side BPR which redesigns existing facilities efficiently. It analyzes employee activity flow as well as customer activity flow, and then produces a new layout of facilities. Then it updates them considering real limitation and recommends alternatives. Each alternative is evaluated through simulation, it finally selects an alternative. We illustrate the suggested redesign procedures step by step through a retail business process redesign.