can actually produce fundamental improvements for business operations. However, in order to achieve that, there are some key success factors that must be taken into consideration when performing BPR. BPR success factors are a collection of lessons learned from reengineering projects and from these lessons common themes have emerged. In addition, the ultimate success of BPR depends on the people who do it and on how well they can be committed and motivated to be creative and to apply their detailed knowledge to the reengineering initiative. Organizations planning to undertake BPR must take into consideration the success factors of BPR in order to ensure that their reengineering related change efforts are comprehensive, well-implemented, and have a minimum chance of failure. This has been very beneficial in all terms Critique Many companies used reengineering as a pretext to downsizing, though this was not the intent of reengineering's proponents; consequently, reengineering earned a reputation for being synonymous with downsizing and layoffs. In many circumstances, reengineering has not always lived up to its expectations. Some prominent reasons include: Reengineering assumes that the factor that limits an organization's performance is the ineffectiveness of its processes (which may or may not be true) and offers no means of validating that assumption. Reengineering assumes the need to start the process of performance improvement with a "clean slate," i.e. totally disregard the status quo. According to Eliyahu M. Goldratt (and his Theory of Constraints) reengineering does not provide an effective way to focus improvement efforts on the organization's constraint. Others have claimed that reengineering was a recycled buzzword for commonly-held ideas. Abrahamson (1996) argued that fashionable management terms tend to follow a lifecycle, which for Reengineering peaked between 1993 and 1996 (Ponzi and Koenig 2002). They argue that Reengineering was in fact nothing new (as e.g. when Henry Ford implemented the assembly line in 1908, he was in fact reengineering, radically changing the way of thinking in an organization). The most frequent critique against BPR concerns the strict focus on efficiency and technology and the disregard of people in the organization that is subjected to a reengineering initiative. Very often, the label BPR was used for major workforce reductions. Thomas Davenport, an early BPR proponent, stated that: "When I wrote about "business process redesign" in 1990, I explicitly said that using it for cost reduction alone was not a sensible goal. And consultants Michael Hammer and James