hen the Defense Department's Corporate Information Management initiative was redirected in 1990 to focus on improving business processes, a group was chartered to help DoD managers reengineer their organizations. Soon they discovered that the average process-improvement analysis project could take up to 20 weeks and cost $1 million. In an effort to reduce the time and money needed for agencies to get the ball rolling on reengineering projects, DoD worked closely with Systems Research and Applications Corp. of Arlington, Va., to develop a software tool known as TurboBPR.
Designed to consolidate about 140 of the Pentagon's reengineering tools, TurboBPR makes it easy for managers to identify goals and performance measures, develop business plans, project costs, document activities, relate investments to performance changes and measure achievements. It incorporates requirements of the Government Performance and Results Act and contains modules for doing improvement analysis and building alternative strategies.
The Pentagon claims the software is capable of trimming process-improvement costs by as much as 30 percent while reducing reengineering start-up time from months to days. The software already has achieved positive results in major DoD medical, communications and transportation programs. More than 1,200 copies have been distributed to civilian and Defense managers, and that doesn't include the number of copies downloaded from the World Wide Web (http://www.dtic.mil/c3i/bprcd).
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