Chimera or Culture? Business Process Reengineering for Total Quality Management

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Abstract
This article reviews the literature on business process reengineering (BPR) and explores its linkages with total quality management (TQM). The history of the development, ideals, beliefs, values, knowledge, means of implementation, and techniques involved have demonstrated many similarities in these two approaches. The early successes in BPR were in organizations with strongly evolving TQM cultures, and it is identified that the cultural change involved in maintaining the results of process redesign is the most difficult part of the BPR process. TQM programs are claimed to have failed because they do not produce large enough gains quickly enough, but the cultural ideology of TQM in several organizations has provided the environment necessary to sustain the new and radical process redesigns, while BPR has provided the broader process perspectives described by many authors. This, in turn, has facilitated the realignment of business processes to achieve radical change in strategic direction. BPR and TQM would appear to be part of an evolving culture of process orientation that started in the quality movement(s) of the 1980s, and has a commitment to continuous process improvement in the 1990s.

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