Re-engineering of Products and Processes through a value oriented approach

During the last twenty years a multitude of methods has been developed with the aim of supporting business process reengineering activities. Most of these methods are focused on pursuing time and cost reduction policies in order to preserve the competitiveness of products and services on the market place. A deep analysis of the literature shows that such kind of business process initiatives failed in pursuing this objective, since redesign efforts should be focused not only on cost and time reduction, but also on those aspects mostly impacting the customer perceived value. Starting from the evidences of this analysis, the research activity performed in this doctorate was aimed at defining a roadmap to support business process initiatives swivelled on the value generated for the end user. The Thesis describes the roadmap and its implementation according to the class of business process re-engineering problems to be addressed. The methodology is a systematic approach with manifold tasks, that links New Product Development, new value proposition strategies and Business Process Re-engineering issues. Three exemplary applications are described in order to clarify its customized application for different business re-engineering problems, coming from different industrial sectors. The contents are organized in 7 main Chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the scientific context of the research and describes the pursued objectives. In the Chapter 2 a critical review of the existing tools and methods in reference to the methodological objectives, is presented. Chapter 3 is specifically dedicated to the description of the roadmap, by providing for each step, the suitable tools for the implementation, on the basis of the kind of industrial re-engineering problem under investigation. Chapter 4 illustrates the application of the method to different case studies. Chapter 5 reports the description of the experimentation that has been executed to verify the robustness and repeatability of the key steps of the roadmap. In Chapter 6, discussions are presented about the effectiveness of the method, the achievement of the methodological objectives and possible future research activities that can be developed starting from the results obtained by this research. Eventually, in Chapter 7 the conclusions are drawn.