A guide to combining two powerful management techniques to transform any business organization into a masterpiece of business efficiency. Lester Dean Thurow, Dean of MIT's Sloan School of Management, recently stated that benchmarking combined with process engineering will be the most important management technique of the 1990s.
In Business Systems Engineering, Gregory H. Watson describes how top corporations around the world have already successfully implemented that powerful cutting-edge technique to promote continuous improvement. More importantly, he shows you how you can do the same in your organization. Drawing on numerous success stories, including those of Compaq, United Services Automobile Association, Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, Ford, Chrysler, Honda, Toyota, and Xerox, he extrapolates a set of coherent guidelines that managers can follow to transform their organizations into streamlined models of business efficiency that are more dynamic, productive, and capable of quickly adapting to today's ever-changing global business environment. While the driving forces behind business systems engineering are process reengineering and benchmarking, it also incorporates crucial aspects of TQM, business process improvement, policy deployment, industrial engineering, teamwork, problem solving, and information technology. As you read this fascinating and instructive book, you'll recognize the influence and best of Tom Peters, Peter Senge and Taichi Ohno, Shoshana Zuboff, Margaret Wheatley, Edwards Deming, and Joseph Juran, and a host of luminaries from the world of business theory. And you will be inspired by Gregory Watson's deftness in incorporating those ideas into a bold new approach to linking innovation with organizational restructuring and the rethinking and redesigning of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in quality, cost, service, speed, and every other critical measure of business performance. Leading ongoing organization-wide change is the greatest challenge facing top management today.Now Business Systems Engineering arms you with the most potent and versatile tool yet for meeting that challenge.