(FORTUNE Magazine) – Last fall the Reader's Digest published a joke about reengineering--a tipoff that the management cult of the early Nineties had passed its peak. (A good joke too: An optimist is someone who says a glass is half full. A pessimist says it's half empty. A reengineering consultant says, "Looks like you've got twice as much glass as you need.")

Now comes word of some top people leaving CSC Index, whose CEO is James Champy, co-author with Michael Hammer of Reengineering the Corporation; of layoffs this summer at Gemini Consulting; and of cost cutting and price pressure in the reengineering fraternity in general. Says a top manager at one large consulting firm: "A booming business fell off a cliff."

Reengineering is far from dead, so keep your resume up to date. But mass production has come to the industry. Says Francis Gouilliart of Gemini: "We're seeing the commoditization of reengineering as a skill." Businesses are reengineering as much as ever--or more--but those frequent-flying armies of pricey MBAs have given ground to in-house task forces, plug-and-play solutions (when you've streamlined one accounts-payable process, you've streamlined them all), cheaper labor from hardware companies' consulting divisions, or, says Gouilliart, "the Cleveland office of a Big Six firm." The moral: Haggle.

--Thomas A. Stewart