Organizational structure adjustment in the process

Organizational structure adjustment in the process of business process reengineering

the process reengineering theory, which rose in the early 1990s, uses information technology to redesign the business process of enterprises, reorganize the working system, break departmental barriers, guide the attention of personnel to the needs of customers, and strive to achieve breakthroughs in key performance such as quality and speed. Since the business process reengineering theory was introduced into China in the middle and late 1990s, with the deepening of theoretical research on the development of extruder industry, there is still a large market space. In particular, some large enterprises such as Lenovo, Huawei and Haier have carried out the practice of enterprise reengineering to varying degrees, and have made phased achievements. More and more managers began to introduce this management theory into enterprises. However, whether in the practice of enterprises or in the field of academic research, too much energy is still invested in the technical link. The focus of attention is on how to use information technology to achieve enterprise informatization, how to redesign the work system and business processes, and little attention is paid to how to adjust and control human behavior adaptively

this paper believes that the process of business process reengineering in a wide range of enterprises is not just "business process redesign". In the process of business process reengineering, it involves major changes in organizational structure, human resource management system and corporate culture, and challenges the behavior and core values of personnel, which is the difficulty of management. Without the corresponding adjustment of organizational structure, manpower and culture, the real transformation of business processes is difficult to occur, and even the possibility of redesign is very small. In the process of supporting business process reengineering, the adaptive adjustment of organizational structure is an important link. It involves the redesign of power route and the redistribution of decision-making power, the corresponding changes in the path and mode of information communication, and how to form the whole from individuals, departments, teams to enterprises. The core argument of this paper is to implement business process reengineering in the whole enterprise. A key link for success is whether the "redesign and implementation of business processes" and "adjustment of organizational structure" can be considered. The two are a mutually adaptive dynamic matching process

Case Study of Huawei and Lenovo

this paper illustrates this problem through case analysis, that is, the actual implementation process of Huawei and Lenovo. The view of this paper is only based on the results of a few enterprises' investigation, and its scope of application needs to be supplemented and amended by more case studies. Because these two enterprises are the enterprises that have carried out business process reengineering earlier in China, their experience and lessons are worth learning

Huawei R & D process reengineering case

in 1997, Huawei realized that the current business process of the enterprise could not meet the needs of strategy. After a period of thinking, Huawei began to implement IPD (integrated product development) projects with R & D as the entry point in early 1998, that is, business process reengineering with R & D as the core. At that time, the choice of R & D field was mainly based on two considerations: first, if Huawei intervened in the system and terminal markets, it would need to develop products. Foreign manufacturers took advantage of R & D advantages to gain market share of products. Due to the relatively long R & D cycle, Huawei always lagged behind its rivals in the introduction of new products, so that foreign manufacturers would gain profits in two stages: high price skimming and price reduction and volume expansion; Second, R & D belongs to the upstream of enterprise operation. Once there is a problem in R & D, it will continue to magnify errors in downstream production, sales and other links, and the overall loss of the enterprise is very large. It can be said that Huawei has found the core of the problem by taking R & D as the starting point

in order to implement the IPD project, Huawei has set up a special project team, equipped with professionals and special office space. After a period of work, the project team came up with a business process reengineering plan, which included the design plan of the new R & D process and the content of organizational structure adjustment. Then each product line began to implement the new IPD process, and its management method was project management. In general, the general design idea is that through the close cooperation between R & D personnel and relevant personnel in other functional fields, the interface links of the whole R & D process can be opened up, and the management of the product life cycle process can be gradually realized, which is in the right direction. However, the results of the implementation are far lower than expected, the new process is inefficient, and even a chaotic situation has occurred. The old problems still exist, and at the same time, new troubles have arisen. The reengineering project has been complained by many people

although in the later experience summary, there are various explanations for the reasons for the failure, it is believed that sorting out the following materials will be helpful to friends in the leather industry, such as: the overall structure design of the process is not reasonable, the R & D team has not been authorized, the definition of responsibilities is unclear, the lack of new performance appraisal, and so on. These problems are indeed the reasons for failure. Generally, enterprises will not adapt or even be confused after a period of time when implementing process reengineering projects for the first time. But if we consider it from a more essential and deep-seated reason, a more critical problem is that Huawei is eager to adjust the organizational structure without completely and carefully redesigning the R & D business process, and the input is obviously insufficient. This is tantamount to adjusting the personnel arrangement and the power and communication route without knowing the specific work to be done. The result will certainly cause confusion, This confusion is not the maladjustment caused by many changes in the general sense, but there is a logical sequence error. This point was fully explained in Huawei's practice later

in 1999, Huawei learned from previous experience and learned that it was not able to reengineer its R & D process alone, so it hired external consulting companies to participate in the project. With the help of IBM consulting company, the IPD project was launched again. This time, the experts of old m and the staff of Huawei spent a long time together to conduct an in-depth analysis of the business process, subdivide various work stages and tasks related to R & D into one "activity", and redesign the combination of various activities by using new technologies such as information technology. The method of decomposing work tasks proposed by IBM experts has greatly touched Huawei's personnel. In the past, Huawei's R & D management only roughly decomposed and described the whole work system for the stages of requirement description, concept formation, preliminary product design and some important work tasks. Now, with the requirements and technical support of IBM experts, Huawei needs to refine the stages and tasks into "activities", and it needs to have a detailed description and necessary quantitative indicators for activities. In this way, in the process of continuous adjustment, a new structure of the reengineered R & D process is gradually formed. Then Huawei's real large-scale organizational structure adjustment was carried out in 2003, that is, after the R & D process was fully understood, redesigned and adjusted, the large-scale organizational structure adjustment was carried out. At this time, individuals 2, inspection methods, teams or departments have a relatively clear understanding of what work needs to be done, Have a further understanding of how to do the work, so that the adjustment of the organizational structure has a foothold

Lenovo process integration case

in 2004, Lenovo gradually promoted the integration of the two enterprises after the merger of the IBMPC business division, trying to make the business merger of the two enterprises to give play to the effect of complementary advantages, but one difficulty of the integration is that there are great differences in the business processes of the two enterprises

the competitiveness of the original IBMPC mainly depends on its strong R & D advantages and brand effect, so it has not paid much attention to the connection of processes for a long time. R & D, production, marketing and logistics work are led by different departments, and there is a lack of coordination between them. For example, in the case of rapid changes in the PC market, the price adjustment of products requires a certain degree of flexibility. When competitors adjust the prices of some products or product series, products with the same performance in their own product line should give timely feedback on the prices, but the pricing power of IBMPC is always in the hands of the financial department, which leads to the coordination problem between the financial department, marketing department and sales department. When contacting the front line of the market, the sales department often looks at problems from the perspective of customers and competition, while the financial department mainly looks at problems from the perspective of the internal financial management of the whole company. Sometimes there are contradictions between the two, which will lead to extremely inflexible price adjustment strategies. It can be said that IBMPC Department has always adopted the traditional functional organizational structure

on the other hand, since the launch of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) in 1998, Lenovo has successively implemented the construction of e-commerce platforms with SCM (Supply Chain Management), CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and PLM (product life cycle management) as the core, which not only strengthens the degree of informatization of the enterprise, but also, more importantly, through this process, Lenovo actually combs and reengineers the overall business process of the enterprise, A great step has been taken towards a process based organizational structure. For example, in terms of the above-mentioned product price adjustment, Lenovo has been able to quickly feed back according to the needs of the market, and various functional departments can cooperate relatively well with the needs of process approval

facing the difference between Lenovo and the original IBMPC business process, Lenovo hopes to integrate their business processes, but it faces many difficulties in reality. According to the traditional division of labor, the original MPC division assigned different work to different departments, and did not consider much about the overall process of the enterprise. The traditional concepts and departmental barriers formed by IBMPC in its long-term operation are difficult to break, which makes it difficult to redesign the business process, let alone the actual integration of the two. Without the support of all departments, there is not enough information and technical support for the sorting and design of the process. After all, professionals in all departments have the most in-depth understanding of their work, and the redesign of the process cannot be separated from the full support and participation of personnel in all departments. It can be seen that in the face of some practical problems, the smooth implementation of business process reengineering may start with the appropriate adjustment of the organizational structure, and first change the path of some power and information

although this case of Lenovo does not specifically explain how an enterprise reengineers its business process, it is a problem of how two companies operating the same business integrate their business processes after merger, it clearly illustrates how the existing organizational structure problems such as power lines and communication channels restrict the integration of business processes. In the long run, if Lenovo wants to give full play to its competitive advantage as a whole, it must connect the business processes of "Lenovo China" (centered on the original Lenovo domestic business) and "Lenovo international" (centered on the original IBMPC business unit), which have great commonalities with the internal business processes of other enterprises

analysis of the implementation strategy of process reengineering

through the summary of the practice of the above two enterprises and our investigation of other enterprises, we can clearly summarize a context: process reengineering is not a simple technical problem, and the redesign of business processes is only an important step. To implement new processes, we must adjust the organizational structure of power lines, communication methods and department composition accordingly.