Key Points

• BPR is about outcomes, not tasks.
• Technology plays a key role in the success of any redesigned processes.
• BPR is a customer-first approach, and challenges all assumptions you might have with business processes.

Whether it’s from faulty implementation, the prevalence of waste, or even just shifting priorities, processes can slip out of spec with ease.

When you don’t have the means to incrementally improve things, you aren’t left with many options.

Sure, you can try to kitbash an ad-hoc solution and hope for the best, but that runs the risk of costly rework and slipping deadlines.

You might need to start from scratch and build a process from the ground up to better suit your operational needs.

Business process reengineering isn’t intended for every process you’ll encounter, but this drastic approach might be what your business needs to continue surviving.

So, let’s look at why you might want to consider it, and what it entails for your organization.

How BPR Drives Radical Change

BPR doesn’t approach work or processes as a siloed means of organizing by function. Instead, you’re taking a more holistic approach from the bottom up in how you do business. There will naturally be other processes developed as a matter of course, but that isn’t the defining methodology behind BPR. Instead, it concerns itself with the end-to-end processes meant to deliver continued success to a business.

Outcomes, Not Tasks

When you think of how we approach typical workflows, they are concerned with individual tasks. These are performed by different departments, before being handed off to someone else in a completely different part of the business to complete the work. This introduces quite a few handoffs, which increases the chances of delays. Further, there is a stark lack of accountability and transparency when accounting for most traditional means of doing work.

BPR isn’t oriented towards the traditional. It instead acts as a complete and drastic overhaul to the way a task is done. You aren’t concerned with the minute details of a process when starting your efforts. Instead, you are gearing towards results. Consider something like shipping goods from a warehouse to a customer.

Previously, a business might log the order from sales, move it to warehousing, and finally to shipping before it’s out of the company’s hands. Under a newly designed process from BPR, that would be handled by a single case manager from start to finish. You get consistent results, reduced errors, and a significant increase in speed with minimal handoffs needed.

Leveraging Technology

You might be under the pretense that BPR doesn’t use technology. In all honesty, it is a foundational element of the methodology and something that drives process design forward. Automation of basic, menial tasks is a common usage of it. This frees up workers to handle more complex issues that require a human touch.

Additionally, you’ll be making use of shared databases. This does away with fragmented data streams. A cohesive, shared database and integrated systems mean that data is captured once at the source. Further, this cuts back on redundancy, which can lead to errors down the road.

More importantly, what technology enables is empowering workers. Frontline employees have access to real-time streams of information and are now capable of making decisions that were once reserved for management. Technology flattens your organization’s hierarchy, speeding up response times and promoting accountability throughout the entire workflow.

Challenging Assumptions

One of the most important things you can do in BPR is to challenge the very foundation of your processes. Asking why forces you to question every step of a given process to determine if it’s necessary for operations. You can think of it as a means of reducing waste, but the overall aim is going to be far more pronounced when the rubber hits the road.

Organizations that have been operating for years likely have accumulated no shortage of non-value-added activities, redundant handoffs, and unneeded approvals. Questioning why these processes exist in the first place and what is truly necessary for their successful operation can pave the way toward a more streamlined workflow.

Further, everything you’ll do under BPR is going to be aligned with the expectations of your customers. By taking a customer-first response to process design, you can deliver faster, efficient service, higher-quality goods, and a more seamless customer experience from start to finish. Any successful BPR implementation aims to deliver tangible benefits to your customers, resulting in higher satisfaction and return business.

BPR Methodology

You don’t approach BPR haphazardly. There is a structured methodology to maximize results and make the most of your efforts. As such, when going through the steps needed to revamp and overhaul faulty processes, you’ll want to stick to the plan as closely as you can.

Define Goals

Any BPR effort starts with clear, defined goals for the effort itself. You aren’t going to be endeavoring to do gradual, incremental improvements. Instead, your organization is going to see rather stark changes in no time at all as you pursue new processes based around a clean slate approach. Instead, the focus needs to be placed on the ideal goals for a process’s overall performance.

Analyze Current State

Before you get to work at ripping things out and starting from scratch, you’ll want to take inventory and analyze what is currently being done with your process. This is an exhaustive process that takes a closer look at current performance, handoffs, bottlenecks, and every step present. As previously mentioned, this is a fantastic time to get to the why behind everything. You want to challenge the status quo, as it clearly isn’t working.

Redesign the Process

Process reengineering is arguably the most creative and radical phase of the methodology. You’ll want to discard the old process, and start building a fresh one from the ground up. Along the way, you’ll be looking to streamline things significantly, eliminating redundancies, and keeping things simple as you go. Additionally, this is where you’ll start integrating technology, like the aforementioned automation and other uses.

Implement Changes

After some hard work, you should have a fresh new process. Getting the changes to stick is going to take a significant amount of change management including employee training, a shift in organizational culture, and even how you choose to communicate with your team. You’ll want to stick with this, however, as going back on the changes is going to result in a complete bust of your BPR efforts.

Evaluate and Iterate

After the implementation is successful, this is where you start to implement continuous monitoring. Additionally, continuous improvement efforts should be pursued to refine things as they move out of spec or whenever any sort of bottlenecks are detected.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

Ready to keep going? You might want to take a closer look at how to implement continuous improvement practices to make sure your customer satisfaction sticks for good. Customer satisfaction can be a key indicator that something is going wrong with your practices, but with the right measures, you can get things back on track.

Additionally, you might want to take a closer look at how Six Sigma can give you a leg up in manufacturing. Making use of some of the key elements of the methodology can greatly benefit your organization, and can help set you apart from the competition.

Conclusion

BPR can be a shot in the arm for organizations that are struggling to remain competitive. By operating from a clean state, focusing on leveraging technology, and empowering employees, you can fundamentally reinvent how your company operates. Results can be dramatic, but you’ll want to make sure you know how to navigate the changes that will occur.