Mahindra & Mahindra: Implementing BPR

The concept of BPR was popularized in the early 1990s by Michael Hammer and James Champy in their best-selling book, ‘Reengineering the Corporation.' The authors said that radical redesign and reorganization of an enterprise was necessary to lower costs and increase the quality of service. According to them, IT was the key enabler for that radical change. Hammer and Champy felt that the design of the workflow in most large corporations was based on assumptions about technology, people and organizational goals that were no longer valid. They recommended seven principles of reengineering for streamlining work processes and, consequently, achieving significant levels of improvement in quality, time management and cost (Refer Table I)...

M&M's workforce, as mentioned earlier, resisted this attempt to reengineer the organization. Soon after the senior staff began working on the shopfloors, the first signs of the benefits of BPR became evident. Around a 100 officers produced 35 engines a day as compared to the 1200 employees producing 70 engines in the pre-BPR days.

After five months, the workers ended the strike and began work in exchange for a 30% wage hike. As the situation returned to normalcy, BPR implementation gained momentum. M&M realized that it would have to focus on two issues when implementing the BPR program: reengineering the layout and method of working, and productivity...