Business Process Reengineering as it Relates to the Accounts Payable System of the United States Postal Service

A set of principles from more than two centuries ago have changed the structure, management, and performance of American business throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For two-hundred years, people have built their companies around Adam Smith’s brilliant discovery that industrial work should be broken into its simplest parts. In the post-industrial business age of modern day, new corporations will be built around idea of again combining those tasks into clear business processes. The techniques that will accomplish this is Business Process Reengineering (BPR). This narrative opens a provocative and controversial book: “Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution” by Michael Hammer and James Champy. This thesis covers this hottest concept of modem business, Business Process Reengineering, and the causes that make this radical change process necessary. This thesis gives a definition of Business Process Reengineering, covers various philosophies about it, identifies the many different roles involved in these philosophies, touches on the magnitude of the task of Reengineering an atypical accounts payable department, and shows how work radically changes in an organization where Business Process Reengineering is being fulfilled. This theses shows how Business Process Reengineering can get complex when dealing with an organization as big as the United States Postal Service; specifically, the United States Postal Service Accounts Payable system