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在这种背景下，结合美国企业为挑战来自日本、欧洲的威胁而展开的实际探索，1993年哈默和钱皮出版了《再造企业》(Reengineering the Corporation)一书，书中认为：“20年来，没有一个管理思潮能将美国的竞争力倒转过来，如目标管理、多样化、Z理论、零基预算，价值分析、分权、质量圈、追求卓越、结构重整、文件管理、走动式管理、矩阵管理、内部创新及一分钟决策等”。1995年，钱皮又出版了《再造管理》。哈默与钱皮提出应在新的企业运行空间条件下，改造原来的工作流程，以使企业更适应未来的生存发展空间。这一全新的思想震动了管理学界，一时间“企业再造”、“流程再造”成为大家谈论的热门话题，哈默和钱皮的著作以极快的速度被大量翻译、传播。与此有关的各种刊物、演讲会也盛行一时，在短短的时间里该理论便成为全世界企业以及学术界研究的热点。IBM信用公司通过流程改造，实行一个通才信贷员代替过去多位专才并减少了九成作业时间的故事更是广为流传。
BPR的历史
In 1990, Michael Hammer, a former professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), published an article in the Harvard Business Review, in which he claimed that the major challenge for managers is to obliterate non-value adding work, rather than using technology for automating it.[1]This statement implicitly accused managers of having focused on the wrong issues, namely that technology in general, and more specifically information technology, has been used primarily for automating existing processes rather than using it as an enabler for making non-value adding work obsolete.
1990年，前麻省理工学院计算机科学教授迈克尔·哈默在《哈佛商业评论》上发表了一篇文章，在文中迈克尔·哈默提出一个论断，称管理者们最主要的挑战是去除非增值的工作，而并不是使用科技使工作变得自动化。这个论断从一个侧面批评了把精力放错地方的管理者们，也就是主要运用统称的科技，和更加具体化的信息技术使流程自动化，而不是将这些技术作为一种工具，来去除非增值的工作。
Hammer's claim was simple: Most of the work being done does not add any value for customers, and this work should be removed, not accelerated through automation. Instead, companies should reconsider their processes in order to maximize customer value, while minimizing the consumption of resources required for delivering their product or service. A similar idea was advocated by Thomas H. Davenport and J. Short in 1990[2], at that time a member of the Ernst & Young research center, in a paper published in the Sloan Management Review the same year as Hammer published his paper.
迈克尔·哈默的论断很简单:人们进行的大部分工作是没有给客户带来价值的，而这部分工作是要被去除，而并不是通过自动化来提速的。同时，公司应该重新审视他们的流程，从而使客户价值最大化，使传输产品或服务所消耗的资源降到最少。1990年，即在迈克尔·哈默发表上述论断的同一年，《斯隆管理周刊》的成员托马斯·达文波特和J·邵特也提出了相似的论断。
This idea, to unbiasedly review a company’s business processes, was rapidly adopted by a huge number of firms, which were striving for renewed competitiveness, which they had lost due to the market entrance of foreign competitors, their inability to satisfy customer needs, and their insufficient cost structure. Even well established management thinkers, such as Peter Drucker and Tom Peters, were accepting and advocating BPR as a new tool for (re-)achieving success in a dynamic world. During the following years, a fast growing number of publications, books as well as journal articles, were dedicated to BPR, and many consulting firms embarked on this trend and developed BPR methods. However, the critics were fast to claim that BPR was a way to dehumanize the work place, increase managerial control, and to justify downsizing, i.e. major reductions of the work force [3], and a rebirth of Taylorism under a different label.
Despite this critique, reengineering was adopted at an accelerating pace and by 1993, as many as 65% of the Fortune 500 companies claimed to either have initiated reengineering efforts, or to have plans to do so. This trend was fueled by the fast adoption of BPR by the consulting industry, but also by the study Made in America, conducted by MIT, that showed how companies in many US industries had lagged behind their foreign counterparts in terms of competitiveness, time-to-market and productivity.
Development after 1995
With the publication of critiques in 1995 and 1996 by some of the early BPR proponents, coupled with abuses and misuses of the concept by others, the reengineering fervor in the U.S. began to wane. Since then, considering business processes as a starting point for business analysis and redesign has become a widely accepted approach and is a standard part of the change methodology portfolio, but is typically performed in a less radical way as originally proposed.
More recently, the concept of Business Process Management (BPM) has gained major attention in the corporate world and can be considered as a successor to the BPR wave of the 1990s, as it is evenly driven by a striving for process efficiency supported by information technology. Equivalently to the critique brought forward against BPR, BPM is now accused of focusing on technology and disregarding the people aspects of change.
