Can Reengineering Be Separated From Restructuring, Research Paper Example

The business world is an ever-changing and ever-evolving part of the economy, which means that businesses, themselves, must also change over time. There are various reasons for this. Businesses often need to make changes due to growth or downsizing of the organization, and this requires both reengineering how business processes work and restructuring how the business is set up. However, the question arises about whether reengineering can be separated from restructuring within an organization. To understand the concept of reengineering and restructuring being necessarily combined, it is first necessary to have an understanding about each individually.

According to Sungau and Msanjila, reengineering increases a company’s effectiveness through efforts to transform, integrate and rationalize the organization. Reengineering involves four concepts: 1) innovative rethinking, 2) process functioning, 3) radical change, and 4) organizational development and performance. Together, these concepts are initiated by the creativity and inspiration of an organization’s team members, which translates into customer value by way of every process within the organization operating at the highest efficiency. In addition, changes are necessary to the survival of an organization and leads to innovation, new ideas, technological advancements, and organizational process improvements, which are keys to the successful growth of a company. This is why it is important for organizations to recognize that change is necessary and to learn how to manage it effectively, as performance levels must be managed for efficiency to improve organizational activity levels to meet standards and remain competitive (Sungau and Msanjila). This is true even though some people may not like change; however, an organization should not let this type of mindset ruin its chances of becoming a better organization through change.

Restructuring

Restructuring is often done on a regular basis in many organizations, which is driven by the need for strategically aligning processes with continuous improvements, for example, adopting a new company initiative to become more global or to improve business performance by reducing costs. These types of initiatives often require developing new structures within an organization to accommodate the changes. Also, reengineering is often necessary for a business to remain profitable in the market, which means that organizational restructuring involves implementing new practices, systems, and procedures to support the organization’s reengineering initiatives (Balogun).

Reengineering

Reengineering of an organization involves management needing to rethink, reorganize, regroup, and redesign business processes for the purpose of improving efficiency measures that are related to such aspects as quality, cost, service, or speed of processes. Restructuring, on the other hand, occurs when management creates new positions or changes the organizational structure to support the changes brought about by the reengineering process. These organizational structure changes do not only apply to employee positions, but also to changes in enterprising activities, production programs, and economic areas within a business (Dubrovski). As it relates to whether reengineering and restructuring business activities must be carried together or whether they can be separated, it is shown that reengineering is an important part of the restructuring process (Sungau and Msanjila). In other words, restructuring encompasses reengineering, so it is assumed here that one without the other would result in inefficient organizational change processes.

Works Cited

Balogun, Julia. “The Practice of Organizational Restructuring: From Design to Reality.” European Management Journal 25.2 (2007): 81–91.

Dubrovski, Drago. “Restructuring and Business Reengineering in Integrative Processes.” Managing Global Transitions 3.1 (2005): 71–93.

Sungau, Joseph and Simon Samwel Msanjila. “On IT Enabling of Business Process Reengineering in Organizations.” Advanced Materials Research 403–408 (2012): 5177–5181.