Case study: Business Process Reengineering General Motors Corporation “General Motors is one of three leading automotive manufacturing companies in the United States. Based in Michigan in 1903 by Henry ford and grew to reach revenue of $150 billion and more than 370,000 employees by 1996. In the 1970’s, the automobile market for the major auto makers – General Motors (GM), Ford, and Chrysler- was crunched by competition from foreign manufactures such as Toyota and Honda. In 1999, Ford acquired the Swedish Volvo model in an attempt to compete in the foreign market and expand to other regions. General Motors needs to use the business process reengineering for the information systems infrastructure to cut redundancies and requiring information process and the link among Ford centre in world wide. “General Motors implemented a 3-year plan to consolidate their multiple desktop systems into one. This new process involved replacing the numerous brands of desktop systems, network operating systems and application development tools into a more manageable number of vendors and technology platforms.
It also included upgrading program for the implementation of a common business communication strategy across the world. ” Reengineering the information system infrastructure of GM has increased transparency to the customers. Not only GM’s staff can update the company’s information exactly in the same time and improve the communication among colleagues, but the customers or suppliers can contact the company by real time event they are not in their countries also.
After this plan was applied to the Ford centers across the world, it can save 10% – 25% on support costs, 3% – 5% on hardware, 40% – 60% on software licensing fees, and increased efficiency by overcoming incompatibility issues by using just one platform across the entire company. This case study can be concluded that the business process reengineering can make more profit and reduce the payrolls in term of evaluation; reducing the support costs up to 25% and 60% for software license. Source: S. Ahmed, “Ford Motor Company – Case Study”, (August 18, 2002), www.
EzineArticles. com http://www. scribd. com/doc/6660939/Business-Process-Re-Engineering Case study: Business Process Reengineering Ford Motor Company Ford reengineered their business and manufacturing process from just manufacturing cars to manufacturing quality cars, where the number one goal is quality. This helped Ford save millions on recalls and warranty repairs. Ford has accomplished this goal by incorporating barcodes on all their parts and scanners to scan for any missing parts in a completed car coming off of the assembly line.
This helped them guarantee a safe and quality car. They have also implemented Voice-over-IP (VoIP) to reduce the cost of having meetings between the branches. From this case study, I understood the level of commitment large firms have to maintaining their position in the market. These companies know the revolving nature of business in the sense of how easy it is to fall back if they did not keep up with the change. The Ford process also shows the need for quick and resourceful thinking when faced with situations that might seem to be unfavorable.
The way Ford ventured into the foreign market by acquiring local manufacturers was a strategic decision that did not only enabled Ford to merge with different technologies, but it also saved it the additional cost of establishing production centers in Japan and Europe. Source :http://www. scribd. com/doc/6660939/Business-Process-Re-Engineering : Ford Motor Company – Case Study Case study: Business Process Reengineering TDG is one of the leading European supply chain management companies, employing around 7,000 people across the UK and continental Europe. The company achieved turnover of ? 31 million in 2006. Serving a variety of clients, from large blue chip companies to smaller local operations, TDG handles the storage, loading, transportation and delivery of a wide range of goods – from refrigerated foods to industrial supplies and hazardous chemicals. The company’s 125 sites provide more than 1. 1 million square metres of warehouse space and support 1,600 vehicles. With large volumes of often dangerous goods being loaded and unloaded from TDG vehicles every day, occupational health and safety is a key concern for the company, as Peter Coghlan, TDG’s Safety Director, explains TDG realised that a major contribution to this programme could be made by optimising the company’s internal processes in a number of areas. Risk assessments, incident and near-miss investigations and monthly health and safety reports all relied in part on paper-based systems and manual processing, which could be slow and cumbersome. ” The use of business process reengineering has offered TDG to take pride in their ability to load & transport goods safely. The company realised that streamlining data-collection and improving reporting capabilities could make a major contribution to its ongoing health and safety improvement programme
This case study can be concluded that the business process reengineering can make more profit for the benefits of the FastWorks and Lotus Domino solution became evident almost immediately. With a single repository for all health and safety data – from risk assessments and best practices through to incident reports – the visibility of important information throughout the company is much higher. Moreover, TDG is currently working with ThroughBox IT to extend this function, making it easier to create customised reports for ad-hoc analysis. Source: http://www. ibm. com
