Managerial preconditions for implementing major changes in corporate processes

This thesis investigates whether management behaviour impairs major changes in corporate processes. The focused areas were new complex product development process and business process re-engineering in post-privatisation companies. Several surveys were carried out in Brazil, North America, and Europe involving companies either that deal with new complex product development or companies that have experienced a privatisation process. An aircraft manufacturer company, located in Brazil, was selected as the case study company. The author selected top 10 preconditions to succeed in a Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) endeavour and observed their evolution in the case study company. The most important contribution of this thesis is related to the identification of a pattern in the case study company to deal with major changes in corporate process. The investigations at the case study company indicated that if the top ten BPR pre-conditions to succeed evolve, it is likely to have success in the BPR activities. The achieved results are compared with an extensive literature review, which covers topics such as cultural change, management behaviour, business process re-engineering, new product development, integrated product development, concurrent engineering, privatisation process, and organisational changes.