West Park Hospital knew it needed to redesign structures and re-engineer processes to maintain its competitive advantage—specialized, client focused rehabilitation and continuing care services. A major element of this redesign has been the transition to product-line, or program, management. It has taken several years to reach the current structure and, although results are good, the process has not always been simple. The hospital's experiences parallel those of businesses undertaking similar re-engineering initiatives. West Park advises other organizations to anticipate resistance to change, remain flexible, involve everyone, and recognize that it is impossible to communicate too often or too much.
Manufacturing enterprises in eight European countries anticipate accelerating performance improvements in business processes, together with balancing problems and huge integration needs in information systems development. Evolution management practices differ according to national culture. In Finnish companies, a new successful mode of strategic evolution management has been identified, that builds on empowerment, innovation and systematic learning. In contrast to traditional strategic planning, the results are better competitive performance, IT-integrated business processes, less resistance to change, and a stepwise manageable development.
Despite the high failure rate among those who attempt to re-engineer or transform their businesses there are still a number of successes. This case study, which examines how a long time assurer in South Africa totally transformed its business, and in so doing improved their performance more than 10-fold, deals with the issues of changing marketing strategy, organizational structure, as well as establishing a learning organization and taking fuller advantage of outsourcing opportunities. The case study reports on a project which has now been operating for some 4 years and which has delivered some very substantial improvements in the performance of the organization.
In 1993–1994 Syntex Corporation re-engineered its sales and product forecasting processes in order to improve accuracy and responsiveness to rapidly changing market conditions in the pharmaceutical industry. The case study presented here details this re-engineering work and its global implementation.