TABLE OF CONTENTS In today's dynamic industrial sector, reengineering has become an important issue. For example, a survey of large corporations indicates that approximately 90% of the companies were involved in business process reengineering projects and many others were seriously planning to execute such projects [1, 2]. Usually the organizations involved in reengineering target their efforts on areas such as development, manufacturing, logistics, distribution, and customer support [3].
In the mid-1950s the Japanese company Toyota revolutionized production processes and delivery capabilities, thus paving the path to reengineering. During the period of the 1973 oil embargo, other Japanese companies were quick to learn the process-oriented concepts of Toyota and started to convert to process-driven production. By 1983, the executive suites of the largest companies in the West were well aware of the basic principles of the Toyota production system known as the just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing.
Although some organizations claimed to have performed business process engineering well before 1990, the term reengineering, coined by M. Hammer and J. Champy, became popular in 1993 [4 6]. This chapter presents important aspects of reengineering.
Some of the terms and definitions1 directly or indirectly concerned with reengineering are as follows [4 8]:
Reengineering. This is the examination and alteration of an item or a system under consideration to reconstitute it in some new form and for the subsequent implementation of that form.
Software reengineering. This is the examination and alteration of an existing item or system to reconstitute it in...
