Annals of Reengineering

In the September issue of the MIT Faculty Newsletter, Professor Alexander Slocum of Mechanical Engineering suggested that it would be helpful if the Newsletter carried a Q&A or a special page dedicated to Reengineering. Professor Slocum wrote that unless Reengineering is continually marketed to the faculty, they might "suffer from severe apathy and misinformation."

As head of the Community Involvement team, I discussed this idea with the managing editor of the Newsletter, and we decided to include a regular update on Reengineering. It will feature items from the various projects, and will include both positive and negative aspects of Reengineering. This first column will correct some inaccurate news linking upcoming changes at Technology Review to Reengineering; will provide information from the recent review of the Mail Services redesign; and will include some updates on SAP.

If faculty members have specific questions or concerns about Reengineering that they would like to see addressed in future articles, they can send them to me via e-mail <jsnover@mit.edu>, call me at x8-5993, send a note to my office, Room N52-413, or contact the Newsletter.

A column in the November 14 issue of The Boston Globe incorrectly attributed staff changes at Technology Review to MIT’s Reengineering effort. The changes, which were approved by Technology Review’s Board, are not part of the Reengineering project. In fact, the publisher and editor of Tech Review plan to relaunch the magazine in 1998 with major changes in both content and design. The new editorial focus will be on innovations in science and technology, and articles will be written by professional writers rather than by experts. The publisher and editor want the magazine to appeal to a broader audience, and aim to increase its circulation from about 90,000 to a long-term goal of 200,000.

Two positions at Technology Review were eliminated and all the remaining design and editorial positions have been revised. Current staff can reapply for the new positions.

One of the most controversial of MIT’s Reengineering projects involved the redesign of Mail Services. Though the furor in the community about Mail has died down somewhat, there were still issues and questions about the redesign that Senior Vice President William R. Dickson and Physical Plant Director Victoria Sirianni thought should be revisited. For that reason, they convened a team in June to study how Mail Services was doing.

Specifically, the team was charged with reviewing the implementation of the redesign in the following ways: document the goals originally established by the Mail Services redesign team, understand current processes, evaluate progress toward full implementation, and recommend additional elements to improve the overall process.

The review team finished its work and submitted a report to Mr. Dickson and Ms. Sirianni in late October. Though it would be premature at this point to publish their recommendations since these are still being considered, Mr. Dickson agreed it would be helpful to share some of the overall findings and data on savings. Here are some excerpts from the report.

"Many elements of the redesign have now been fully implemented. In some cases, variations from the original design have been necessary in order to ensure sound business practices and to respond to community reaction. Rollout of both the distributed mail centers (DMCs) and outbound mail systems were slowed, partially due to difficulties encountered in convincing the community to adopt new practices. At present, all of the planned 36 DMCs are fully operational and receiving inbound mail, but it is estimated that only 60 percent of the mail leaving the Institute is processed using Mail Services’ outbound mail system."

Regarding inbound mail: "The DMCs provide exchange locations for departments and Mail Services, equitable delivery services across the Institute, twice-daily deliveries, and 24-hour community access. Same-day delivery is the standard for delivery of inbound mail, and next-day service is the standard for handling interdepartmental mail."

"Overall savings achieved through staff reductions and minimized postage costs are estimated at $800,000." Here are the elements of that savings:

• The number of full-time-equivalent central staff in Mail Services has been reduced by 12, with associated savings to the Institute of approximately $492,000 annually.
  
  
• The use of a mail consolidator service, with cost reduction of 2 1/2 cents in postage per envelope, resulted in savings estimated at $31,000 in fiscal year 1997.
  
  
• Handling of international mail centrally resulted in FY97 savings of approximately $134,500 to MIT’s departments, labs, and centers. The new international mail contract has reduced the cost of letters from $7.00 to $6.10 per pound, and air printed matter from $5.50 to $4.45 per pound. (These rates compare quite favorably to the normal U.S. Postal Service rates of $16.00 per pound for letters and from $7.20 to $9.25 for air printed matter.)
  
  
• Improved overnight carrier services have been negotiated, resulting in a reduction of eight percent for domestic service and 19 percent for international service. Savings are estimated at $85,000 overall.
  
  
• Departments, labs, and centers have saved about $45,000 through the elimination of 64 percent of the postage meters on campus.
  
  
• The upgrade of software to barcode and sort bulk mail also has resulted in savings. For example, the savings in mailing Tech Talk alone to outside subscribers is approximately $15,000.

In the "Lessons Learned" section of the report, the review team noted some significant challenges in trying to make changes at MIT. "Perhaps the most difficult issue faced by the Mail Services manager was the task of implementing a new organization whose success was based on the acceptance of the community where use of its services was not mandatory....Community resistance was strong, resulting in substantial delays in the identification of space for distributed mail centers, implementation of the DMCs, and rollout of the outbound mail system."

More than 700 employees, who were selected by their departments, have already been trained in SAP Basic Skills and in Display and Reporting since the beginning of August. This was referred to as Phase One training. The Management Reporting Project’s training team is now preparing for Phase Two, which it will pilot with the Administrative Services Organization (ASO) beginning in January. The ASO staff will start their training with procurement functions including requisitions, journal vouchers, manual reservations, and the MIT credit card.

On November 20th, the Management Reporting Project announced enhancements to the "SAPweb" lookup tool, which provides an interface to data in SAP. Many of your administrative and support staff colleagues are using the tool to look up information about SAP purchase orders and invoices. Now, users can see the account numbers (cost objects) charged for each item and the split among accounts if more than one account was charged. In addition, a number of bug fixes were incorporated into the new version of "SAPweb." In one day of usage since the enhancements were announced, there were 698 requests for requisition or purchase order information from 102 individuals. A tool like "SAPweb" is significantly reducing the number of phone calls made from departments, labs, and centers to Accounts Payable and Purchasing because users can now get the information they need on their own.