The global business and marketplace have changed dramatically during the past two decades. Today, for the first time in history, manufacturing, service, and distribution businesses are becoming competitors (for example, Dell both manufactures and distributes computers) and compete for economic survival. Moreover, as Peter Drucker notes, organizations have shifted from a command and control structure to an information-based structure. These structural changes have created the need for focusing managerial attention on ways for acquiring and integrating information to achieve continuous improvements in their operations processes.

The quest for "continuous improvement and process reengineering" has come to embrace a wide range of organizational decisions and concepts used for improvements in all manufacturing and service industries. Experimentation in labs, application of tools on the shop floor, investment in new capital equipment or information systems, and foremost needs for adoption of lean and appropriate technology, all are influenced by the process configuration and the direction chosen for process reengineering. Moreover, management of the new processes, the volume of information technology needed to operate effectively, and the natures of those information technologies are dramatically and fundamentally changing. Just as the product life cycles are becoming shorter, so are the process life cycles.

Managers should realize that the amount and degree of process reengineering, along with needed capital investment, fully depends on the existing capability of the organization. They must want to not only survive economically, but also to prosper continuously. However, the integration of continuous improvement requires a full understanding of the organization process, its configuration, and its elemental relationships with one another.

Today, since organizations are becoming increasingly information-based in structure, one can argue that the most important capability and strength of an organization would be how rapidly it can accumulate information and knowledge for improving the existing processes continuously. Traditionally, managers and process design engineers perceived that their role was to design a foolproof process initially, and to consider improvements later, if that was necessary at all. Today, on the contrary, a company needs to know how a process can be designed so that it facilitates subsequent improvements.

Consequently, the understanding of the elemental processes and the way those elements are configured at different stages of organizational knowledge and capabilities are essential, and those can lead the managers to form the most effective approaches for process reengineering, and thus better performances and higher productivity. This, if not the only way, would be the shortest way to survive economically and prosper continuously in today's business environment.