Summary: X-Engineering the Corporation

Review and Analysis of Champy's Book

BusinessNews Publishing

• Publisher: Must Read Summaries
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9782511017098
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Industria informática

The must-read summary of James Champy's book: `X-Engineering the Corporation: Reinventing Your Business in the Digital Age`.

This complete summary of the ideas from James Champy's book `X-Engineering the Corporation` shows that the time is right for managers to achieve breakthrough performance by managing across multiple organisations (X-engineering) rather than simply attempting to optimise their own standalone business operations (re-engineering). In his book, the author demonstrates the potential of X-engineering and how it will be the driving force of corporate growth for the next 25 years. This summary is a must-read for anyone wanting to learn more about the concept and how it can help you boost your business' performance.

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To learn more, read `X-Engineering the Corporation` and discover the key to boosting business performance.

Summary of X-Engineering the Corporation (James Champy)

1. The X-Engineering Concept

Main Idea

X-engineering is all about achieving breakthrough improvements in business performance by using information technology to redesign the business processes which cross organizational boundaries.

Supporting Ideas

X-engineering will require managers to pay close attention to the three P’s of their business:

1. Processes – all the things a company does to create and sell goods and services. Broadly speaking, these processes will group naturally into three categories:
   • The processes you perform yourself – which form the entire basis for your organization’s own competitive advantage. These may be open or proprietary but they remain under your firm control.
   • The processes you perform with others – the transfer of information, goods or money between you and your suppliers, partners and customers.
   • The processes others perform for you – through outsourcing arrangements where you can take advantage of the operating efficiencies of others.
   X-engineering will require firms to reexamine how they classify specific processes in closer detail. Greater efficiency can now be derived by moving more and more processes from the “perform yourself” category into the “perform with others” and “have others perform for you” categories than ever before.
2. Proposition – the value proposition you offer customers. Business propositions come in at least seven different types:
   • Customization – letting customers create their own products and services.
   • Innovation – cutting edge products.
   • Price – having a lower price than anyone else.
   • Quality – better than anything else.
   • Service – knowing the customer’s needs better than anyone else.
   • Speed – being able to deliver before everyone else.
   • Variety – having a deep selection of products and an efficient process for choosing.
   X-engineering means that companies pool resources and work together to create compelling new value propositions. Any business that excels at any of the basic value propositions can collaborate with others to create new hybrid combination value propositions which cannot even be imagined or visualized.
3. Participation – deciding who will participate with you in X-engineering. This requires considering which organizational boundaries will be crossed, and who you will partner with. Generally speaking, participation will fall into one of four basic levels:
   • Level 1 – A company redesigns its own processes.
   • Level 2 – A company redesigns its processes along with those of one other type of business organization – a customer or a supplier or a partner.
   • Level 3 – A company redesigns its processes simultaneously with those of two other types of organizations. This may be customers and suppliers or suppliers and partners or customers and partners
   • Level4 – A company redesigns its own processes in close collaboration with three other types of organizations – partners, customers and suppliers.
   X-engineering suggests the best opportunities to create value will be where the greatest number and richest diversity of participants are involved. This will also be the most difficult X-engineering project to manage well.

Key Thoughts

“All companies think of e-commerce as an add-on to their existing business. I call this the drive-in window mistake. When cars first came along, many businesses just assumed they would add a drive-in window but that the rest of their business would essentially remain the same. But the real impact of cars was to move shopping traffic from downtown to the shopping malls. Suddenly, realize it or not, everyone was in the shopping-by-car economy. In the same way, all business is becoming e-commerce. Adding a Web portal to your existing business is like adding a drive-in window to a downtown department store. Instead, information drives the entire process from discovering products to selecting them, transporting them, servicing them and managing the relationship with the customer. Managers must rethink their entire business.”

– Danny Hillis, cofounder, Thinking Machines Corp.

“X-engineering is about optimizing relationships so that companies can tap the full sum of the intelligence and experience of all of the people in its network of customers, suppliers and partners.”

– James Champy

“Reengineering and X-engineering are alike in that they both make it possible to greatly improve business performance. They both require radical rethinking and fundamental change, and they both have a process focus. Then they part company....