Ensuring Survival through Business Process Re-Engineering (BPR) in the Manufacturing Industry: The Case of a UK SME

Purpose
The British plastics processing industry is facing increasing pressures from competition, new technologies and increasing globalisation. This research investigates how a British family-owned plastics injection mouldings manufacturer uses Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) and Kaizen to ensure improvements in operational performance and their ability to compete with firms from overseas.

Design/Methodology/Approach
This case study investigates the processes of operational performance improvements in the case organisation. Primary data was collected from semi-structured interviews with key experts from the company and document analysis. This identified key themes that were related to strategic decisions to radically redesign their business processes in order to achieve improvements in critical performance indicators.

Findings
The firm’s radical redesign of business processes achieved improvements in critical performance indicators such as cost, quality and service, as well as ensuring their financial and market position in the face of the competition from the Far East and Eastern Europe. Business Process Re-Engineering (BPR) brought transformational change in the key areas of people, process, planning, product, and price. They also took account of the human side of re-engineering by shifting from a top-down autocratic approach to a flat company structure.

Originality
Access to a family-owned Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) offered a rich contextualised knowledge and understanding of BPR implementation practices. These practices are seldom documented in the literature and manufacturing firms find it challenging to implement BPR. The conclusion emphasises the contradictions between general BPR theory and actual practical implementation. One reason for these inconsistencies may be the vast academic differences and lack of consensus as to what constitutes ‘pure’ BPR. This work addresses the paucity of empirical studies of BPR in family-owned SMEs. It also meets calls to investigate the processes of lean manufacturing and continuous improvement (CI) in specific contexts.

Keywords
Kaizen, Business Process Re-engineering, Operational performance, Continuous improvement, Lean manufacturing, Plastics processing, SME