Business reengineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical
Redesign of the business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed.
Business process reengineering or BPR means not just change but dramatic change and dramatic improvements. This dramatic change is achieved by the overhaul of organizational structure, management systems, job descriptions, performance measurements, skill development, and training and most importantly, the use of information technology. BPR will impact every aspect of how the organization runs its business. Change on this scale can cause results ranging from enviable success to complete breakdown and failure.

A successful BPR can result in dramatic performance improvements, increase in profits, better business practices, enormous cost reductions, dramatic improvements in productivity and so on. It can also create substantial improvement in quality, customer service, employee satisfaction, profitability and other business goals of the company.
The promise of BPR is not empty, it can actually deliver what it promises. The stories of BPR failures are due to the improper implementation or other factors.BPR can help a successful company to stay on top or transform an on the verge of bank raptly company into successful one.

In many cases, the BPR projects have failed to meet the high expectations recent surveys estimate the percentage of BPR failures to be high as 90%. Some organizations have succeeded only in achieving marginal benefits even after spending huge amounts of time and money on BPR. Some others who were not that lucky have succeeded only in destroying the morale and momentum built up over the lifetime of the company These failures indicate that reengineering involves a great deal of risk. But even after all these talks about failures, many companies are willing to take the risk because the rewards can be astounding. Even though there are many cases where BPR has resulted in catastrophic results, the fact that a properly implemented BPR has the ability to produce dramatic improvements still remains.

As far as the history of BPR is concerned it is assumed that during the period 1990- 1993, management experts like Dr. Michael Hammer, James Champy and Thomas Davenport, after great amount of research and studies of successful industries created the concept of BPR.
Hammer , named by Business week as one of the four preeminent management gurus of the 1990’s ,together with Champy, chairman of csc index, inc. gathered information about organizations thriving in their respective industries along with assorted management consulting experiences.

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