Key Points

• Business Process Reengineering is a process that can be super effective when implemented properly.
• The whole idea of eliminating inefficient processes, all while adding customer value, ultimately leads to a better bottom line.
• The goal should be to cut out work that is unnecessary for employees and allow them to focus on what drives the most change.

When you think about Business Process Reengineering, you might be thinking about a strategy to organize a business or organization’s workflows better. The goal is that if you are able to reengineer business processes, you are going to find a clearer path toward eliminating waste, which in turn leads to increased profits.

Rest assured that the world is changing fast, and organizations have to keep evolving, not to keep pace, but to succeed at all. This means that not only do you have to keep an eye on what the competition is doing, but also look inward to identify the areas that can be improved and drive the argument forward to optimize every possible process so the company is as efficient as possible.

What Is Business Process Reengineering?

Best known as BPR, Business Process Reengineering is essentially a strategy in which a company, large or small, takes a look at what processes exist that can be scrapped. It doesn’t really matter what the process is, but whether or not it’s something that is truly necessary to do the job that needs to get done.

BPR was coined by Michael Hammer in the 1990s, and his vision was to enable a process that helps organizations cut costs, sometimes dramatically, as well as speed up everything else. The goal is not only to excite and deliver more to your customers, but to get through any backlogs of work that have been on the shelf forever, just waiting for someone to find the time to finish everything.

The core of BPR is to work with cross-functional teams and say goodbye to whatever is causing a pile-up of work. This isn’t a gentle Kaizen process; instead, it’s trying to ask the question of “Why do we do it this way?” and then asking if there is something about this process that might be causing bottlenecks internally. BPR has quickly proven itself to be an ideal solution for systems that are already clogged and where small fixes are just band-aids on a broken leg.

The hope, or the goal at least, is to utilize BPR in such a way that it can deliver dramatic changes in key areas, where backlogs are no longer nightmares haunting employees as they sleep. Instead, it asks for rapid change in an organization, and it does so in a way that is undoubtedly disruptive, but necessary. In other words, when you need to bring out the heavy artillery to make significant and wide-ranging changes inside an organization that includes getting rid of a backlog, BPR is the answer.

BPR and Backlogs Are a Perfect Match

Let’s imagine you are sitting at your desk and staring at what feels like a mountain of tasks or emails just waiting for you to get started. It’s overwhelming, and to many employees and teams, it feels like an impossibility to overcome a backlog that just keeps growing larger.

Well, this is why BPR exists and also why it has become such a necessity for companies that need to dig out of trouble. This isn’t just shoveling the backlog from one pile to another; BPR is about going past surface-level changes and finding the core of the reason why backlogs exist. You might think of rebuilding a road instead of just constantly patching potholes, which only works for a while before the road needs to be closed or repaved.

Now, with the repaved road, cars travel freely and smoothly, and this is a prime metaphor for what happens if you redesign your workflows to prioritize outcomes instead of routines that are simply no longer working. This is why this 1990s idea of BPR has worked everywhere from Fortune 500 names to smaller remote teams. Better yet, BPR works seamlessly with modern tools like AI and automation, even encouraging their use to help get through a backlog even faster, all with fewer errors. Using AI and automation can mean clearing a backlog in hours and days instead of weeks and months.

Of course, don’t forget the customers, as customer value is the entire reason why clearing backlogs is a necessity. A team that feels less stress from overwork is going to be freer to innovate and deliver a better experience around customer value. BPR and backlogs are undoubtedly made for each other, and the results they deliver can win over customers and, in turn, lead to more profits.

The Challenges with Backlogs

As anyone who has ever had a backlog knows, they are the silent killers of productivity and introduce anxiety and nerves as well. Whether it’s a constant stream of emails, IT tickets, approvals, work orders, or working with outdated and slow tech, it can frustrate teams across an organization to no end.

Instead of driving ahead to deliver a better experience for customers, resources are getting tied up putting out backlog fires. This hinders forward progress, which all comes back to affecting profitability, customer value, and customer experience. Worse yet, employees of an organization might feel like a growing backlog could harm their job security, which is also a concern as they become more anxious, which leads to errors.

If you try to dig deeper, you’ll quickly understand that in the BPR and backlog world, siloed departments are also a major challenge. Legacy software is a problem, which is why AI and automation are so forward-thinking and have become so popular so quickly. The hope is that these tools can prevent backlogs from breeding more backlogs, which just ends up causing more of a headache for everyone.

The good news is that there is hope at the end of the tunnel, and, as you know, you need help with a backlog through methods like BPR. If you can allow the chaos internally to be exposed, you can find a way to repave the road to speak and start burning through what’s been waiting.

How BPR Clears Through Backlogs

Radical Process Redesign

If you want to love BPR and everything it brings to the table, you have to start by questioning every step that is part of the current process. This is what a major redesign looks like. Are you essentially going to blow up current processes, rebuilding them as streamlined versions, and cut out all of the unnecessary waste?

Anything that might have caused a backlog previously, such as old software, now needs to go. As silly as it sounds, you might want to Marie Kondo everything and only keep what adds joy to the work process, which, again, sounds silly. Still, think about keeping only the processes that can really help with work, and nothing else.

Leveraging New Technology

As we’ve already hinted at previously, the introduction of technology like AI and automation to handle repetitive and time-consuming tasks is going to go far in helping eliminate backlog. Even something as trivial as data entry can be automated, which not only frees up an employee or dozens of employees to work on other tasks, but it also cuts out the likelihood of human errors.

Better yet, automation is not only clearing out old tasks and projects, but it’s also preventing new ones by making sure volume doesn’t spike. Digital tools are not just good on paper; they might as well be your new sidekick internally, and as they are integrated into your workflow, you’ll begin to wonder how you ever worked without them.

The goal here is to track the return-on-investment by adding these tools inside an organization. It shouldn’t be all that difficult to show how automating something like data entry in turn translates to employees getting other work done that leads directly or indirectly to more customer value and increased profits.

While the idea of bots handling grunt work tasks might seem new to many organizations, this is the future of work.

Fostering Cross-Functional Teams

BPR does a great job of trying to break through the siloed barriers that exist far too often inside organizations. Everything from breaking down the reasons why handoff delays are taking place by reorganizing teams around outcomes instead of tasks, shows why cross-functional teams and BPR work so well together.

The hope is that by fostering cross-functional teams, communication barriers are also coming down, so work is getting sped up by teams talking among one another. If teams are not communicating, there is a better than good chance that they are actually creating new backlogs by duplicating work or one team thinking the other is doing work, and vice versa.

The goal is that you can foster cross-functional teams with the end result of doubling throughput without having to add to headcount. This keeps the company from spending more money, as well as ensuring that existing employees feel secure in their work.

Implementing Change Management

One final consideration around how BPR and backlogs work together is that BPR can help an organization dive headfirst into training employees right from the start of a new program. Instead of training teams in small groups, train teams together so they can ask the same questions at the same time and leave their training with a focus on the right objectives and goals.

Employee buy-in is going to be critical to ensuring the success of BPR and clearing of backlogs, so you are going to want to track how employees are feeling regularly. Even with all of the right training, some people might feel uneasy about change, even if it’s for their own good, so knowing how they are feeling is the best way to ensure they are delivering at or above 100%.

Benefits and Outcomes of BPR in Clearing Backlogs

The end game is that BPR is going to blast your backlog to bits, delivering faster throughput and reclaiming lost opportunities. In other words, if you can introduce BPR, you are going to say goodbye to any flawed processes that exist in favor of processes that are vastly more efficient.

The hope is that with BPR, internal teams will breathe a little easier, which means less stress, which in turn means lower turnover numbers. Leaders communicating better is also going to help, as well as these leaders pushing for cross-functional work that can help eliminate many of the backlogs that exist due to siloed work structures.

Ultimately, the goal is to have BPR add a bold culture, where backlogs are a thing of the past.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

Do you want to learn more about BPR? If so, there is plenty of good news, and you might want to get started by learning how BPR can deliver radical turnarounds in your organization. Another strong read is all about how BPR and automation are changing workflows.

If you want to move beyond BPR, you can take a long and hard look at how Lean Thinking has been able to help transform industries like healthcare, finance, and education. Another really strong one is all about Value Stream Mapping, a process not so dissimilar from BPR, but this time, it’s all about how VSM can help with service operations.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, BPR is like dynamite to backlogs, and organizations are all the better because of this reality. The goal is to redesign the world for speed and to do so in a way that rebuilds the organization in a way that introduces everything from radical overhauls to saying goodbye to inefficient processes forever.