The long-term viability of an organization’s business plan depends on sustaining its competitive advantage. Renewing competitive advantage is usually achieved through developing new products and services, restructuring and improving business processes, or in other words adding value. Over the last 10 years, several factors have accelerated the need to improve business processes, the most obvious being technology.
New technologies are rapidly bringing new capabilities to businesses, thereby raising the competitive bar and with it increasing the need to improve business processes dramatically.
Improving business processes is paramount for businesses to stay competitive in the current global marketplace.
esadvisors.net
ADVERTISEMENTS:
Over the last 10 to 15 years, companies have been forced to improve their business processes, because modern day customers are demanding better and better products and services at competitive prices.
Another apparent trend is the opening of world markets and increased free trade. Such changes bring more companies into the marketplace, and competing becomes harder and harder. In the current marketplace, major changes are required to just stay even. It has become a matter of survival for most companies.
As a result, companies have sought out methods for faster business process improvement. Moreover, companies want breakthrough performance changes, not just incremental changes, and they want it now because the rate of change has increased for everyone; few businesses can afford a slow change process.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
One approach for rapid change and dramatic improvement that emerged in this backdrop was Business Process Re-engineering (BPR).
These developments are subsequently aligned within a KM framework. This will enable the reader to visualize KM in the right perspective and provide an insight into the fundamental differences in the objectives of these techniques.