Beyond Business Process Reengineering: Towards the Holonic Enterprise

How is your business these days? Do the following sound familiar? Market share flat or falling? Margins being squeezed ever thinner? Increased competition from new players? Technology out-racing you? Customers wanting more than you can offer? In all businesses today the answer is - yes! For many, the solution is to focus on their core business processes - commonly known as Business Process Reengineering (BPR). Now some businesses have gone beyond BPR and are using holonic networks to respond to the rising challenges of business in the 1990s. Holonic networks give businesses the agility to rapidly change product and service capabilities to meet rapidly changing market demands, offering the following advantages:

• leverage - there is true synergy achieved by combining the best capabilities of many operations.
• speed - decision making is streamlined which shows up as improved time to market.
• flexibility - rapid change to product or service capabilities to match changing customer requirements.
• fast growth and high profits - improving customer responsiveness by 33% results in a growth rate of 300% and up to 500% more profit than competitors.
• sustainable customers - tough for competitors to wean them away.
• reduced capital requirement - shared costs and fuller use made of equipment.
• quick failure recognition - real-time operation recognizes and then fixes failure.

In this book, the authors describe how holonic networks and the virtual companies within them have been implemented in businesses as diverse as Ford, Hewlett Packard, Benetton and R Griggs, the company that makes Doc Marten shoes. Beyond Business Process Reengineering provides a thought-provoking and practical examination of business today. For everyone in business being pulled through competition, technological change and their own reengineering efforts, it provides a new and radical alternative to downsizing, restructuring, cost reduction and strategic repositioning.