What is Business Process Reengineering?

Author: Lorena Mosquera Category: Technology & SAAS, Workflow Date: December 23, 2021

Is your company meeting its goals, and yet you wonder if you could be surpassing them? Or are you perhaps falling a bit short, and you just can’t figure out why? Could the process you are using to achieve them be the problem? Making a change to your business process when you are small or just starting out is fairly simple, but it gets harder as you grow, as you develop more complex workflows, and as your team develops ingrained habits. If that’s the case, you may need more than adjustments; you may need a complete overhaul, or business process engineering (BPR). But what is business process reengineering, and how do you do it?

Processes can’t be improved without change. BPR is a complete business process redesign to make radical advancements to your core practices. It is built on the idea of being prepared to scrap what you already have and starting back at ground level to establish business practices with a fresh outlook. Business process reengineering is what companies often need to reconstruct critical elements of their operation including strategy, organization, culture, quality, costs, service, productivity, efficiency, speed, and outputs and weed out redundancies. Ford Motors, GTE, and Bell Atlantic all serve as examples of business process reengineering and how BPR changed the organizations for the better. Each company famously utilized BPR to cut costs and make them more competitive in their respective industries in the 1990s.

 What are Business Process Reengineering Principles?

Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Michael Hammer, considered to be one of the founders of what is known as business process reengineering, and James Champy, an organizational theorist, wrote the national bestseller Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, which noted seven key principles of what is business process design, including the importance of:

• Organizing around outcomes, not tasks
• Outlining every process used in an organization and prioritizing them based on their urgency
• Integrating information processing into the work that produces it
• Considering geographically separated resources as though they are centralized
• Connecting similar activities in the workflow as opposed to integrating them at the end
• Making decisions where the work is performed and building control into the process
• Capturing information at the source and only once

 What are the Business Process Reengineering Steps?

Businesses process reengineering must be carried out carefully to avoid wasting time and money and creating confusion among your stakeholders. There are some business process management steps that are important to include:

• Clarify your company vision and establish process objectives.
• Assemble a team of stakeholders who can offer insight.
• Gather information on your current business process so you thoroughly understand how your process is doing.
• Analyze this information to identify where the problems and gaps are.
• Identify and remove redundancies.
• Design your new process map based on the insight gathered and be sure to include KPIs for each step.Determine opportunities for added IT support.
• Share the new process with your team and build their capacity to implement it if needed.
• Implement your reengineered process.

The steps in business process reengineering focus on taking a holistic view of where your processes are now, rethinking every function at every level of your operation, and not being afraid to start from scratch.

BPR takes time and resources, so keep that in mind before embarking on it. While they may need a shakeup, it is possible your business processes need business process improvement instead of BPR, which is less time- and cost-intensive, and involves smaller adjustments, not a redefinition of all your processes.

At Paradigm, optimizing your business processes is one of our specialties. We offer business process automation services and solutions to streamline and build structure to improve your operations. If our expertise can help you understand what business process reengineering is for your company so you can start realizing operational gains, please contact us today.