Quantitative risk level estimation of business process reengineering efforts

With risk defined as the possibility of deviation in the results from the expected goals, business process reengineering (BPR) initiatives clearly involve risk taking. However, due to the high expected returns of such efforts, the acceptable risk levels of BPR will tend to be greater than those of less ambitious projects. This research reports the development of a tool to quantitatively estimate the potential risk level of a BPR effort before an organization commits its resources to that effort. The underlying research employed a survey of BPR‐experienced organizations to collect assessment information in order to build a BPR risk estimation model. The developed tool uses triangular fuzzy numbers to approximate the degree of success/failure of proposed BPR initiatives. The tool can be applied by any organization contemplating BPR, thus giving such organizations a heretofore unavailable estimate of the risk level of proposed BPR efforts. Validation was performed based upon an 18‐month BPR project conducted at the Missouri Lottery.