Attaran & Wood 1999 — How to Succeed at Reengineering

A 1999 mid-decade retrospective on Business Process Reengineering, published in Management Decision 37(10), pp. 752–757 (MCB University Press, ISSN 0025-1747). Six pages. Authored by Mohsen Attaran (Operations Management) and Glenn G. Wood (Finance), both at California State University, Bakersfield. The paper sits between the 1993 BPR hype peak (Hammer & Champy 1993) and the 2001 revised edition of Reengineering the Corporation, and uses five US success cases to argue that the concept remains valid despite a documented 50–70% failure rate — provided five success conditions are met and five implementation barriers are avoided.

Empirical posture

The paper is not an empirical study in the modern sense. It is a retrospective synthesis built on four sets of secondary numbers and five case vignettes pulled from prior trade-press accounts. What counts as "success" in the paper is reported improvements from named companies, not measured outcomes from a controlled study.

Failure-rate baseline (p. 752):

Counter-evidence cited (p. 752): a 1995 survey of 180 US and 100 European companies found three-quarters had engaged in "significant" reengineering efforts in the prior three years and that 80% of the cases met or exceeded expectations (Verespej, 1995). The two figures (50–70% failure vs 80% met-or-exceeded) are presented side-by-side without reconciliation — the paper takes both at face value and argues the variance is explained by adherence to the success factors it then lists.

Case evidence

Five US success stories with quantified outcomes, summarised in Table I (p. 754):

Hallmark — product design (p. 753)

Old process: sequential, >20 hand-offs, very inefficient due to in-basket waiting; new product time-to-market up to two years.
Redesign: cross-functional teams from art/design/sales sharing computerised databases; computer-based POS terminals at 1,700 retailers tracking how well each product sold.
Result: design time reduced 200%; >23,000 new card lines launched per year (Wellins & Murphy, 1995).

IBM Credit Corporation (p. 753)

Old process: paper-based credit check passing through six departments; 6 days to 2 weeks per request.
Redesign: collapse multifunctional sequence into a single process owner; reengineering study revealed a single person could do the whole check in <2 hours.
Result: credit application processed and approved in <4 hours (Pegels, 1995).

Ford Motor Company — accounts payable (p. 753)

Old process: 500 staff handling invoice validation across receiving, purchasing, and quality control; conflict between Ford and vendors over discrepancies and payment delays.
Trigger: discovery that Mazda (Ford's Japanese partner) ran the entire accounts-payable function with 5 people.
Redesign: centralised database accessible to all functional areas; warehouse and accounts-payable both have direct access to purchase-order/invoice/receipt data.
Result: AP staff reduced from 500 to 125 (75% workforce reduction); validation/discrepancy/payment-delay problems substantially improved; 95% staff cut in Ford's engine-manufacturing AP division (Hammer & Champy, 1993).

Liberty Mutual — middle-market insurance contracts (p. 753)

Old process: contract issuance "slow, time-consuming, and complex"; each application endured 15–20 inter-departmental hand-offs; preparing a contract took 3 days but cycle-time from initial customer contact to contract issuance averaged 62 days; further delays from independent computer systems requiring data re-entry between departments.
Redesign: cross-functional teams of sales, underwriting, and loss-prevention experts owning end-to-end process from sales planning through application processing and policy issuance; began September 1992.
Result: contract-process time reduced >50%; many more quotes offered than before; quote-to-close conversion doubled; >$50M/year benefit to the company (Hammer & Stanton, 1995).

Wal-Mart — procurement and distribution (pp. 753–754)

Diagnosis: too much cost built into traditional procurement/distribution functions of mass-merchandisers in early 1990s.
Redesign: enterprise-wide IT system linking all retail locations, distribution warehouses, and major suppliers; suppliers receive daily product-movement data and adjust production accordingly; suppliers issue their own purchase orders without waiting for Wal-Mart.
System scope: captures point-of-purchase sales data; consolidates by product type, store, and region; feeds back to management and >5,000 suppliers.
Result: estimated 2 percent cost advantage over nearest competitors. In a market with 6% margins, this is "truly a competitive advantage" (Furey & Diorio, 1994).

Success factors (lessons learned, p. 754)

Five guidelines extracted from the cases:

Strategic mission: reengineering effort should be driven by a clearly defined strategic mission.
Cross-organisational focus: reengineering should focus on important cross-organisational business processes critical to the firm's mission.
Beyond cost reduction: cost reduction is not the only goal — opportunities for new revenue growth could be an important driver.
All-stakeholder profit growth: reengineering should focus on growing profits to benefit all stakeholders (shareholders, employees, management, customers).
Leadership: leadership plays an important role in the success of reengineering efforts.

Barriers to effective implementation (pp. 754–756)

Five primary obstacles, each given a named subsection:

Misunderstanding of the concept (p. 754). Reengineering is widely misunderstood — used as an excuse for layoffs and plant closings, applied to any organisational change. Table II ("What reengineering is not", attributed to Hammer 1990): not downsizing (it eliminates work, not jobs/people), not restructuring (it concerns how work is done, not how an organisation is restructured), not automation (it enables new process design, not new mechanisms for performing old ones), not "more of the same" (it is "a revolution").
Misapplication of the term (p. 755). Reengineering is "not a quick fix program" and "not cheap". It is a powerful tool only as long as it is not used as a label for downsizing. Critically: BPR should not replace TQM or other organisational improvement initiatives — "without a continuous improvement process, reengineering cannot be successful" (p. 755). This explicitly positions BPR as needing a continuous-improvement substrate, foreshadowing the BPM-lifecycle reframe.
Lack of proper strategy (p. 755). Cites Tomasko (1993, Rethinking the Corporation): "Don't fix stuff you shouldn't be doing in the first place." Only strategy can tell you what operations matter. Programs should concentrate first on understanding the nature of the existing process; this knowledge then serves as the basis for redesign with explicit, quantitative output goals.
Management failure to change (p. 755). The fundamental difficulty — the process gets reengineered but management does not. Reengineering changes all aspects of the business, not just jobs and skill requirements; it forces changes in management style. The vertical/command-and-control organisation and old decision-making schemes "no longer work". New requirements: holistic-integrated work organisation, generalists replacing specialists, internal-activity focus shifting to customer focus, rigid infrastructure altered to facilitate cross-functional cooperation. Without "absolute commitment by management of the necessary time, money, and other resources", managers will be disappointed.
Failing to recognise the importance of people (pp. 755–756). The term "reengineering" is "mechanistic and devoid of human content". Companies focusing primarily on process design and ignoring/underestimating people are "guaranteed to fail". Required interventions: thorough skill assessment via job analysis and needs analysis; resource commitment to training; ongoing-endeavour training program; deliberate alleviation of employee fears about job displacement; making employees feel they own the reengineering effort to improve morale. "Without an effective approach to dealing with employees involved in the reengineering effort, the implementation is certain to fail" (p. 756).

The summary section (p. 756) condenses the diagnosis: "Organisations often fail to achieve reengineering objectives because they trivialise the concept. Reengineering is not downsizing, automation, restructuring, or more of the same. It is revising organisational processes and changing the way work is carried out. Reengineering requires creative thinking. It requires a new perspective on the part of management — maybe even a new philosophy."

Position in the literature

A 1999 mid-decade retrospective sitting between the 1993 hype peak and the 2001 Hammer & Champy revised edition. Specifically:

It post-dates the early insider critiques (Hall, Rosenthal & Wade 1993; Davenport & Stoddard 1994) and accepts their failure-rate findings as the empirical baseline that the paper sets out to address.
It re-asserts the Hammer 1990 / Hammer & Champy 1993 definition verbatim and uses Hammer & Champy 1993 as a primary case-evidence source (Ford accounts payable).
It explicitly rejects the BPR-replaces-TQM rhetoric that characterised the early hype: "without a continuous improvement process, reengineering cannot be successful" (p. 755). This is the proto-BPM-lifecycle move — BPR re-positioned as one phase that must coexist with continuous improvement, not displace it.
The "barriers" section is essentially a taxonomy of the failure modes catalogued by bpm-phases-and-bpr-legacy — over-radical scope, IT-determinism without strategy, ignoring people/change-management, conflating reengineering with downsizing, lack of management commitment.

Unique value-add over neighbouring sources: the paper contributes (i) a side-by-side compilation of five quantified success cases with consistent reporting (Table I) — useful as a cited evidence-base for "BPR can work"; (ii) an explicit five-point success-factor list and five-point barrier list that other 90s sources mostly imply rather than enumerate; (iii) the explicit statement that BPR requires a continuous-improvement substrate, prefiguring the BPM-lifecycle integration; (iv) Table II ("What reengineering is not") as a compact disambiguation device.

Cited from

syntheses/bpm-phases-and-bpr-legacy — referenced as a 1999 mid-decade retrospective and a source of compiled BPR-success case evidence and explicit success-factor / barrier taxonomies.

Cited by

(none yet — newly ingested 2026-04-27)

Connections

Related sources:

sources/1990-hammer-reengineering-work — definition of reengineering and 50–70% failure-rate estimate cited verbatim.
sources/1993-hammer-champy-reengineering-the-corporation — definition and Ford accounts-payable case cited.
sources/1993-hall-rosenthal-wade-how-to-make-reengineering-really-work — 20-project, <5% improvement empirical baseline cited.
sources/1994-davenport-stoddard-reengineering-mythic-proportions — adjacent insider critique from the same period (not directly cited by Attaran & Wood, but the failure-mode taxonomies overlap heavily).

Syntheses: syntheses/bpm-phases-and-bpr-legacy

Flags / open questions

Both authors are at California State University, Bakersfield — not a primary BPR research centre. The paper is a synthesis/teaching article, not an original empirical study; case material is drawn entirely from secondary sources (Hammer & Champy 1993, Hammer & Stanton 1995, Pegels 1995, Wellins & Murphy 1995, Furey & Diorio 1994, Verespej 1995). Treat the case numbers as as-reported rather than independently verified.
The 80% met-or-exceeded figure (Verespej 1995) and the 50–70% failure rate (Hammer 1990) are presented without methodological reconciliation — the success-rate variance across the BPR literature is itself a flag the paper does not resolve.
"Application questions" (p. 757) suggest this article was packaged for executive-MBA / practitioner teaching — consistent with Management Decision's editorial profile.