Business process reengineering of an air cargo handling process

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is one of the most recent innovations in industrial engineering and management science which represents the rapid and radical redesign of strategic, value-added processes and the system, policies and organizational structures that support them to optimize the work flows and productivity of an organization. This paper presents a BPR effort and programme of an air cargo handling process at an international airport. The objective of this work is to demonstrate the performance breakthrough of a BPR technique to achieve dramatic improvements in critical measures of contemporary performance with respect to quality service and speed in the airlines cargo handling process. Field data on service dimensions of the process have been collected choosing time as metric. Process-flow diagrams, process analysis worksheets and data summary charts are prepared as effective tools to get a thorough understanding of the existing process with a view to focus on the possible areas of improvements. A fact-based defensible and quantifiable Before-after chart of BPR has been presented for documenting the expected gains. BPR has proved to be a modern innovative useful industrial engineering and management technique to achieve dramatic improvement in operational efficiencies for quality services of the airlines cargo handling processes. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.