Idea 6 - BPR Business Process Reengineering (BPR) was the hot management idea of the 1990s. Enthusiasm for it has cooled, but its underlying principles still make good sense, particularly when applied to bigger, older companies that have become set in their ways. BPR was popularized, if not exactly invented, by Michael Hammer and James Champy in their 1993 book, reengineering the Corporation. Hammer liked to say that BPR was about 'reversing the Industrial Revolution'. What he meant was that, while customer wants and needs were continually shifting in the new Information Age, the way in which many companies met those needs was fixed in concrete. Unlike total quality management (TQM), which tended to end at the doors of each department, BPR took a bird's-eye view of the entire business, and tried to pries open the vertical hierarchies - 'silos' or 'smokestacks' - that had developed over time. It reasoned that satisfying customer needs involved