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Process Re-engineering

Business Process Reengineering involves the radical redesign of core business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in productivity, cycle times and quality. In Business Process Reengineering, companies start with a blank sheet of paper and rethink existing processes to deliver more value to the customer. They typically adopt a new value system that places increased emphasis on customer needs. Companies reduce organizational layers and eliminate unproductive activities in two key areas. First, they redesign functional organizations into cross-functional teams. Second, they use technology to improve data dissemination and decision making.

 Business Process Reengineering Requirement

The need for business process reengineering surfaces in a variety of ways. For instance, in our article “Is it Time to Overhaul Your Processes?” we provide some indicators that it may be time for a BPR project.

  • Customer complaints and refund requests are rising.
  • Staff stress, disputes, and turnover are high.
  • Chaos reigns after experienced employees depart or go out on leave.
  • Profitability is falling.
  • Sales leads are not being followed up quickly.
  • Corporate governance has been lacking.
  • You are struggling with your cash flow.
  • Your inventory levels are rising.
  • You can’t fill customer orders quickly enough.
 Business Process Reengineering works Role

Business Process Reengineering is a dramatic change initiative that contains five major steps that managers should take:

  • Refocus company values on customer needs
  • Redesign core processes, often using information technology to enable improvements
  • Reorganize a business into cross-functional teams with end-to-end responsibility for a process
  • Rethink basic organizational and people issues
  • Improve business processes across the organization

Companies use Business Process Reengineering to :

Reduce costs and cycle times – Business Process Reengineering reduces costs and cycle times by eliminating unproductive activities and the employees who perform them. Reorganization by teams decreases the need for management layers, accelerates information flows and eliminates the errors and rework caused by multiple handoffs.

Improve quality – Business Process Reengineering improves quality by reducing the fragmentation of work and establishing clear ownership of processes. Workers gain responsibility for their output and can measure their performance based on prompt feedback.

Business process reengineering aims to change the way work is done in order to achieve organizational goals such as reducing costs and improving customer and employee satisfaction. Reengineering is the most advanced and holistic form of process improvement. Whereas most process improvement is incremental and focused on tweaking sub-processes, process reengineering is transformational. It involves completely changing the entire process to achieve an entirely different result.