Business process re-engineering

Business process re-engineering (BPR) is a business management strategy, originally pioneered in the early 1990s, focusing on the analysis and design of workflows and business processes within an organization. BPR aimed to help organizations fundamentally rethink how they do their work in order to improve customer service, cut operational costs, and become world-class competitors.

BPR seeks to help companies radically restructure their organizations by focusing on the ground-up design of their business processes. According to early BPR proponent Thomas H. Davenport (1990), a business process is a set of logically related tasks performed to achieve a defined business outcome. Re-engineering emphasized a holistic focus on business objectives and how processes related to them, encouraging full-scale recreation of processes rather than iterative optimization of sub-processes. BPR is influenced by technological innovations as industry players replace old methods of business operations with cost-saving innovative technologies such as automation that can radically transform business operations.

U.S. Developers will work with you to analyze your existing software applications and make recommendations for improvements or additions to your processes.

Some examples of our work with BPR:

Production Control System – Twenty+ end user application that converts customer orders into production orders. The system tracks the progress of each order as it works its way through the plant. It contains several security features to help insure the proper selection of raw material, lot number control (traceability), and the printing of labels for finished goods. To date, the system has managed in excess of 150,000 production orders in 3 production plants located in Connecticut, Colorado and The Netherlands.

Shipping Management System – Ten+ end user application that scans finished goods as they are packed, and tracks shipped items against customer orders. The system also captures and stores lot numbers, and interfaces with UPS, DHL and FEDEX for capturing shipping charges and tracking numbers. As each order is scanned, the system automatically prints the necessary MSDS and COA documents. To date, the system has scanned more than 300,000 order items in 3 customer locations.

Customer Service Center – A web application that allows customers to login and check the status of their orders and their inventory. The system includes a module that runs several times a day to automatically update the web site. The system is written using a combination of Microsoft Access, SQL Server, and ASP.NET. The site receives about 2000 hits per day across about 100 customers.

Web Order Entry System – An ASP.NET application for use by Chemical Marketing’s customers to enter their orders on-line. In-house there is an application that then imports those orders into the Customer Service system for regular processing.

Ship Verify System – An application that interfaces with an in-house Order Management system with FEDEX and DHL. The system takes shipment data from the vendors machines, calculates the appropriate shipping charges (based on customer contracts), then posts those charges to customer orders. This system has helped to save 100’s of man hours per week.

Purchasing System – An application used to track and control the purchasing of product containers and materials used in a production process. The system interfaces with the Production Control system to automatically relieve inventory of containers as they are used in production, thus creating a perpetual inventory system.

Time and Expense Tracking system – A combination in-house heavy-client system and ASP.NET application for the management and billing of labor and expenses for an IBM contingent labor organization.