Key Points

• BPR strips away bureaucracy to speed up approvals, transforming your processes.
• Technology, leadership buy-in, and employee engagement are all key to your BPR effort’s success.
• BPR isn’t without risk, but you can manage these through transparent communication and keeping your stakeholders at the center of the design process.

Waiting weeks for a simple approval is just one example of how red tape and unnecessary procedures stifle productivity. That isn’t to say that bureaucracy is the bane of all businesses, but being able to cut through the fat and get the work done is vital for maintaining efficiency. Delays cost time, money, and morale. Thankfully, making use of business process reengineering offers a means of rethinking approval workflows from the ground up.

Bureaucracy and Bottlenecks

BPR can transform the approval process from sluggish to streamlined. Any organization can see that its approval processes receive a degree of bloat over time. However, it doesn’t have to stay that way. If you’re at the point where you’re considering BPR, you’ve likely exhausted all potential means of continuous improvement. The bottleneck is persisting, so approaching with a clean slate is going to give you fairly decent odds at getting a smooth, seamless approval process rolling.

Unnecessary Sign-offs

Think about your approval processes for a moment. If you’ve got one that requires multiple signatures, is that truly necessary? A reengineered process can consolidate approvals, requiring only one or two approved owners of the approval process to sign off. This helps to streamline the entire process, speeding up backlogs that can see approvals taking days or even weeks to get going.

Automating Routine Checks

BPR champions the use of technology to get things rolling. As such, automating the more banal and routine checks for compliance or budgetary needs can be handled automatically. This frees up human attention and approvals for exceptions when things are going well out of spec.

Assigning Ownership

Instead of having your approvals floating through departments, assigning clear decision-makers can greatly speed up how you approach them. Process owners are defined roles, which eliminates any sense of ambiguity when approaching approvals. Further, this helps to eliminate the need for approvals to travel between multiple departments for what should be a routine procedure.

Digitizing Workflow

Electronic signatures, online forms, and automated routing can help to eliminate the need for email-driven or paper-based approval processes. You still retain records for the sake of compliance and any regulatory needs, of course. However, by embracing digitalization, you’re enabling a speedy, effective workflow for your approval needs.

Embracing any of the mentioned points can have striking results. You’ll see your finance departments get invoices approved in days, rather than weeks. New employees can be onboarded in a matter of weeks, rather than months of idle waiting. Government agencies are even making use of BPR, showing that approval processes can be streamlined in both the private and public sectors with relative ease.

What Business Process Reengineering Really Means

At iSixSigma, we often talk at length about continuous improvement methods like DMAIC or Kaizen. These are fine for refining existing processes, often opting for gradual, incremental changes. BPR isn’t about that at all, however. Business process reengineering is the option for undergoing radical redesigns, asking bold questions about what is and isn’t necessary for a process to succeed.

In the context of something like approvals, that means stripping everything away that doesn’t add value, and starting from scratch. You’ll be reassigning decision rights, often appointing dedicated personnel. Technology is leveraged to reduce the chances of manual bottlenecks arising, thanks to outdated or outmoded means of approval.

Enablers of Success

Any BPR initiative is only as strong as its foundation. Organizations that aren’t committing completely to the initiative are likely to see it blow up in their faces. There are specific enablers that any company is going to have to engage to make the most of their chances.

Technology Integration

Technology is a central tentpole for any BPR initiative. There is no shortage of effective implementations of technology to maximize the chances of success for your BPR goals. You might make use of digital workflow platforms, which help to streamline and route documents where needed with the help of artificial intelligence. Further, you might make use of the likes of automation to remove human bottlenecks, allowing documentation to be checked for compliance without the need for people gumming up the works.

Leadership Commitment

Any BPR effort lives and dies by how senior management chooses to approach it. Leaders have to sponsor and defend these choices, especially when it is incredibly tempting to go back to the status quo. As such, it becomes paramount to make your managers emphasize just how important it is for your BPR efforts to be implemented, as it isn’t just about approvals, but rather the efficacy of your organization’s current and future workflows.

Employee Involvement

Frontline staff are often all too aware of where current bottlenecks are. Involving them from the start of any efforts to map current processes means that you’re targeting the right points of concern when looking at your future process design.

Managing Risks

As you might imagine, undertaking any sort of radical efforts like those under BPR is going to have a degree of risk. It is a powerful means of redesigning processes for the better, but it is not a guaranteed means of success. You’ll have to take the proper precautions when approaching any sort of initiatives.

Change Resistance

People are naturally opposed to change. Something like BPR is a drastic, radical means of change, and something that you’ll likely see some pushback against. It is up to you and your managers to provide transparent communication, training, and other resources to ease the transition and help make the adoption process go through without a hitch.

Over-Engineering

Often, when chasing efficiency, organizations can bury the lede and oversimplify. This is highly understandable, as you’re looking to minimize where things can go wrong throughout the approval process, or any other redesign process for that matter. To counteract this, you want to keep both customer and stakeholder value at the center of your design process, which should help to avoid this completely.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

Ready to start the work week right? You might want to take a look at the metrics you’ll want to keep track of when setting any sort of long-term goals with Hoshin Kanri. It can be hard to quantify any level of success when looking at something as nebulous as goals. However, by applying the KPIs and metrics we’re covering, you’re well on your way to seeing the fruits of your labor.

Additionally, if you’re new to the business world, you might be asking what exactly Six Sigma is. Six Sigma is a philosophy and a methodology that drives business innovation through the pursuit of perfection. Businesses that adopt are looking to minimize waste, remove defects, and make data-driven decisions to meet these goals. Our brief guide covers everything you need to know.

Finally, you might want to build a corporate culture that embraces continuous improvement. While BPR is a last resort of sorts, you’ll need to make minute, iterative improvements with any newly designed process. Building a culture around Kaizen isn’t just about keeping your processes operating smoothly, but about fostering an environment where quality is placed front and center.

Conclusion

Utilizing BPR for your approval processes means cutting past the red tape and delivering rapid, effective approvals. Given the tempo of today’s business interactions, this isn’t just a possibility for organizations, but a necessity to stay competitive in the wider market. You can’t afford to lose weeks on decisions that should take hours. BPR provides the means to cut down on bureaucracy, redesign workflows, and build systems that work at the speed your customers deserve.