NEW AI LIFE TO BPR

The ’80 years have lived the thoughtful leadership of Japan in managerial culture, through Toyotism, JIT, Kanban, Total Quality. USA reaction has been BPR, based on the 1990 book of Hammer and Champy “Reengineering the Corporation”, a true top down American approach, streamlining business processes versus bottom up of Japanese management practices. During Clinton presidency, 60% of multinational listed in Fortune fired 27 million staff people, creating 33 million jobs in services and consulting areas. The strategic portfolio of large enterprises expanded to include also excellent processes, which could be sold to the market, in addition to excellent products and services. This approach definitely killed Europe and Japan economies, which being socio-capitalistic were afraid to apply the radical change of BPR because of unemployment consequences. In 2002 I tried to launch in my lessons at Bergamo University WPR, a BPR web based, abandoned by following teachers because not sufficient academic research based, but well remembered by the students impacted by e-commerce, e-logistic, e- procurement I emphasised to improve processes reinventing and their performances. After 30 years since those gold times for US economy and the starting of European and Japanese decline, an enormous opportunity emerges for relaunching BPR, the use of AI, which some authors called already AIBPR, and I prefer to call AIPR. And this opportunity is not only essential to large enterprise, where the Digital Transformation has been generally only the application of IT to bureaucratic, not streamlined processes, avoiding to eliminate parasitic jobs, always for social worries and IT people very low managerial competencies. But especially opportunity of a jump in today times for SME, 98% of Italy industrial structure, sleeping culturally in familistic type of organisation and low profitable, with good technological innovation on products but not in processes, insufficient finance and marketing capabilities, low level of internationalisation.

Three the levels of AI applications to empower firm performances through reinvention and redesign of their processes. First of all, and this step is determinant for SME, the processes can be identified and modelled in few minutes, extracting the best models in the industry of interest from the worldwide industrial data. Enormously advantaging also for educational efforts of young managers, this approach clarify ideas of startupper, entrepreneurs, top managers, through an immediate comparison with the best performing firms in the specific sector. It permits also to avoid losing time and money in stupid initiatives that people overestimate ignoring what’s already running in the world market. It accelerate the good practices and increase the productivity of entrepreneurs. At a second level of intervention AI helps the reengineering of any single process, confronting KPI and results forecasted with the BIG DATA available in the world, for the singular specific process. And not necessarily the best p[rocesses are in the selected business industry, an administrative process for a steel company, can be improved considering a similar process in airline company or in a Hotel organisation. This approach cut the times and money of redesigning the processes, where generally act very large interdisciplinary teams internal of from consulting companies. At third and more advanced level it’s possible to employ AI agents, delegating them for decision to improve streamlining on the base of international experiences. Of course this level is the more difficult to be accepted from present managerial culture, for trusting reasons. But in few years we will see also this application as a common practice.

I think that these should be the subjects. of a broad discussion, not the very easy but unuseful ethic and normative approaches typical of European. We should work with AI in practical applications in every field and discussing its possibilities and of course mistakes. But learning by doing before that China and USA make another jump in productivity and collective richness, reducing Europe to few and poor activities, less important and at low value added. We should understand as soon as possible that an enterprise will be structured in a large multidisciplinary team governing the business, including a lot of international competencies and humanistic ones, to which will refer automated factories and automated planning and control processes.No middle management for reporting. A lot of very educated workers will be needed and shop level to insure quality of operations and maintanance of robots, but no employees in parasitic tasks. A warning should be done also to slow approach and methodologies of the so called Academic Research, which are cutting a lot of innovative and creative individual contribution, reducing everything to citation of previous researches and to marginal changes to consolidated schemes of the past. This approach sent to teach and lead many Universities by medium and bureaucratic level of brain powered people, whereas new ideas and technology innovation are outside in the market.

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