BUSINESS PROCESS ENGINEERING IN THE CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY

Business process engineering (BPE) is a top-down management approach for increasing efficiency and productivity through radical and fundamental changes to the business processes of the organization. BPE requires firms to initially develop a model of the existing business processes of the firm to distinguish functional tasks from processes used for coordinating inputs, activities and outputs. The model is used for understanding the business processes in the organization and to simulate the effect of changes to the processes. The model can also be used to justify business processes, which involves assessing whether the business process provides value to the customer in its current configuration. Justification requires a careful examination of the key business processes used by the firm to identify systemic shortcomings in the process and to create a new business process to produce greater efficiency. BPE also considers automating as many business processes as possible to increase operational efficiency and the integration of business process tasks. The construction industry has been slow to adopt BPE because of its project approach in which a major firm contracts with various functional service providers and regards each project as unique. The industry focuses on functional task efficiency rather than business process efficiency. There is no formal methodology or criteria for determining whether a business process is effective for a construction firm in its current configuration. The use of performance measures such as costs, task duration times or other metrics can be useful in evaluating the effectiveness of an existing business process and for modeling the possible outcome of a fundamental and radical change to the process.