Total quality management versus business process re-engineering: a question of degree

An increasing number of manufacturing organizations are placing direct emphasis on operations improvement as a means of achieving competitive success. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs), however, generally lack the resources in capital, time and expertise to implement business process re-engineering (BPR), as has been advocated by a number of authors. This paper presents a comparative analysis of continuous improvement (CI) versus BPR approaches to operational change. Change implies risk, and SMEs naturally require a means for establishing levels of uncertainty and net return. Equally, the performance measures adopted by these two (respectively, bottom-up and top-down) approaches differ significantly and normally defy direct comparison. A dynamic systems simulation is developed from a case study within the plastics industry and is used to evaluate the implementation of either varying levels of improvement or natural processes in the case of BPR. Although it is an industry-specific model, the approach raises several implications. Of specific interest is the trade-off between performance improvement and cost, time frame and risk. Attention is also focused on evaluation of the threshold at which the two philosophies overlap and the point at which companies may make the transition between the two philosophies. The paper goes on to evaluate the decrease in the return of investment (ROI), as improvements impinge on other stages within the process, creating up- and downstream bottlenecks. It also evaluates the level of a single 'natural process', as a means of costing BPR implementation. The paper concludes with the definition of ROI curves, which are intended to inform SMEs in the selection of appropriate improvement strategies.