Due to growing concern about the competitiveness of industry in the international marketplace and the efficiency ofgovernment enterprises, widespread initiatives are currently underway to enhance thecompetitive posture offirms and to streamline government operations. Nearly all enterprises are engaged in assessing ways in which their productivity, product quality and operations can be improved. These efforts canbe described as Business Process Engineering (BPE). BPE had its roots in industry under differing titIes: Process Improvement, Process Simplification, Process Innovation, Reengineering, etc. It has matured to be an important ingredient of successful enterprises in the private and public sectors. After extensive exploitation by industrial and governmental practitioners and consultants, it is attracting increasing attention from academics in the fields of engineering and business. However, even with all of this attention in the popular literature, serious scholarly literature on BPE is in short supply. TItis is somewhat surprising, especially since so many large international organizations have attempted BPE projectswith varied success.

Preface. 1. From Reengineering to Continuous Process Adaptation; A.-W. Scheer, Th. Allweyer. 2. Process Ecology: A New Metaphor for Reengineering-Oriented Change; T.H. Davenport, M.A. Perez-Guardado. 3. Cross-Functional Process Integration and the Integrated Data Environment; T.R. Gulledge, et al. 4. Business Reengineering for Information Technology: From Business Process to System Requirements; S.A. Bohner, et al. 5. Delivering Results: Evolving BPR from Art to Engineering; R.J. Mayer, P.S. DeWitte. 6. Market- and Product-Oriented Design of Business Processes; M. Kirchmer. 7. A Configuration-Contingent Enterprise Redesign Model; M.E. Nissen. 8. BPR Methodologies: Methods and Tools; Minder Chen. 9. Knowledge-Based Reengineering of Business Processes: Leveraging the Power of Natural Language; A. Hars. 10. Simulation: A Key to Next Generation Manufacturing; A. Jones, et al. 11. Defense Enterprise Planning and Management; L.M. Sullivan, et al. 12. Supporting Business Process Reengineering in Industry: Towards a Methodology; P.A. Smart, et al. 13. Dynamic Simulation in Business Process Redesign; J.L. Snowdon. 14. IBM''s Approach to Reengineering, From a Development Reengineering Perspective; J. Augstine, P. Aspinwall. 15. Networking as an Enabler of Business Process Reengineering; S. Sadagopan. Index.