Your creativity and knowledge in developing leadership strategies to implement radical change to improve business situations

Instruction Details

This assignment assesses your creativity and knowledge in developing leadership strategies to implement radical change to improve business situations.  The unit learning outcomes that would be assessed through this assignment are:

6.2 Evaluate the various leadership styles for radical change.

6.3 Apply radical change concepts to a case study.

In business scenarios when the “radicalness” of the planned change increases, more revolutionary change tactics needs to be implemented. Business Process Redesign (BPR) is one of the tactics of revamping the businesses at an accelerated pace by reengineering business process, organization structure and use of IT in the organization.

The article ‘Business Process Redesign: Tactics for Managing Radical Change‘ discusses cases of three different organization. The tactics and initiative used to implement BPR in these three organizations differ in their approaches and need for change. Read the article and write a paper addressing the following points.

1. Compare and contrast the BPR initiatives of the three cases discussed in the paper touching upon its suitability in various scenarios.

2. Identify a situation in your workplace where you see a need for radical change in the business process.

• Discuss the situation, the scope and depth of change required. As a leader, what tactics and BPR initiative would you use to implement the change (or changes if there are many).

Case

FinanceCo is a large financial services company. One of the main divisions of the firm began BPR in late 1 980s with an attempt to transform the company from a mass marketer to a personalized services company. The division had experienced declining margins because of problems with persistence and higher costs to acquire customers. The BPR initiative was aimed to result in significant improvements in overall profitability and growth.

DefenseCo was a large manufacturer of industrial equipment. The BPR initiative occurred in the largest business that primarily sold military equipment to the U.S. government. Because of the restructuring and the downsizing of the U.S. defense industry, the company faced the challenge of maintaining a profitable division with a significant reduction in demand. Cost cutting and downsizing had become the order of the day. The new competitive environment had already resulted in major cycle-time reduction in submitting proposals to the government from six to twelve months to three months. Further, the time between the award of the manufacturing contract to the delivery of the equipment was cut from twenty-four months to twelve. All this put pressure on purchasing to reduce its cycle time and hand-offs.

FoodCo was a large food retailer and manufacturer. The BPR effort was undertaken in the manufacturing unit of the firm that had nearly forty manufacturing plants all across the United States. The head of the unit had previously implemented an integrated manual manufacturing system in one of the plants in the 1960s and now envisioned implementing a standard computer-based MRPII system in all of the plants in order to enhance each individual plant’s effectiveness, enhance overall control, and allow the unit to leverage its size with customers and