Incremental and continuous improvement is the backbone of methodologies like Lean, Six Sigma, and even standalone Kaizen implementations. These methodologies hone in on minimizing waste, improving quality, and refining processes over time. Such an approach works well, especially if an organization is working with an otherwise mature, effective system.

What happens when continuous improvement doesn’t work?

Many organizations will run into plateaued performance at some point, where incremental changes seem to yield minimal or diminishing returns. Processes that were highly responsive to refinements stop delivering optimal results. This can be maddening, especially for leaders who are keeping an eye on the numbers. To break through the plateau, organizations make use of Business Process Reengineering (BPR), a bold, transformative means of busting through plateaus and delivering massive improvements from a clean slate.

Understanding the Plateau

Plateauing performance is a natural occurrence for any process over time. In implementations of Lean Six Sigma, there are plenty of focal points to improve early on. Organizations are likely eliminating redundancies, streamlining bottlenecks, and controlling variation within specified parameters. As such, those incremental improvements stand to be massive when you consider institutional investments over time.

However, opportunities for improvement will diminish. Those incremental improvements become harder to achieve. There are a few reasons for this, like the existing process design imposing limitations on performance. Businesses might also find that current technology or tools in the process have reached practical limits. Finally, you might just be dealing with structural inefficiencies that were baked into the workflow of a given process.

You can’t optimize your way past a fundamentally flawed design. As such, a process might need a complete overhaul and a fresh start, not just incremental improvements.

The Benefits of BPR

Business Process Reengineering is a methodology that goes beyond just the confines of incremental improvements. It serves as a radical redesign of existing processes with the core directive of providing dramatic improvements in key areas like cost, quality, and efficiency.

Unlike continuous improvement, which operates under the notion that current processes simply need enhancement, BPR takes a decidedly different approach. Businesses making use of BPR are operating under the concept of completely redesigning a process from scratch, leveraging organizational knowledge, current technologies, and with customer demands in mind.

This creates transformative breakthroughs because this line of thinking completely cuts through the underpinnings of any current processes.

When to Consider BPR

Not every process is going to need a complete overhaul. What makes BPR so effective is that it can be applied readily to high-impact processes that have stagnated despite continuous improvement efforts. As to when to consider BPR, there are a few criteria you can keep in mind:

• Persistent Performance Gaps: Metrics simply aren’t improving despite ongoing efforts to improve.
• High Complexity: Layers of workarounds, ad-hoc solutions, and hacky implementations have made the process overly complicated.
• Major Changes: New technologies, market conditions, or regulatory guidelines might have rendered the current process obsolete.
• Customer Dissatisfaction: Feedback received from customers indicates systemic problems with output, not just isolated defects that fall within acceptable parameters.

If a process fits any of these criteria, it is a prime candidate for a BPR initiative. BPR allows you to rethink and redesign these processes from the ground up.

Key Principles of Successful BPR Initiatives

You’ll often see BPR being touted as a radical means of achieving results, but that doesn’t mean it is without any structure. Successful BPR initiatives follow a disciplined, systematic approach that relies on a few guiding principles.

For starters, you’re beginning with customer demands in mind and working backwards. This means you need a keen understanding of customer demands and expectations. Processes can become inefficient over time simply for the sake of internal convenience, rather than focusing on external value delivered to customers. Reengineering means you’re placing the customer experience first, and the process should be designed to continue to deliver value.

One of the core principles of successful BPR initiatives lies in questioning every assumption about a current process. Does the current process add value? Could it be automated, integrated into another function, or simply eliminated? BPR requires you to think critically about the current state of a process.

Technology is an enabler of processes in BPR, not just a means of handling inefficiencies. Often, businesses will simply opt to automate a problematic process, foregoing addressing the fundamental flaws with a given implementation. BPR uses technology to enhance and strengthen redesigned processes.

You’re not just looking at processes in isolation, either. BPR takes a holistic approach to any process, looking at the entire workflow. You’ll streamline handoffs, eliminate silos, and remove redundancies that are causing degradation of performance.

Finally, leadership buy-in is fundamental for the success of any BPR initiatives. Any initiative can be highly disruptive through changing roles, workflows, and even organizational culture. Strong leadership support, clear communication, and stakeholder buy-in are crucial for the success of your initiatives.

A Real-World Example of BPR in Use

We’ve talked a lot about the theory behind BPR, but how does it look in motion? Let’s propose a hypothetical implementation so you can see how it works. Consider for a moment that a mid-sized e-commerce company has made use of Lean Six Sigma for years. Picking times, packaging quality, and shipping accuracy have all vastly improved over the years. However, a sore point is the shipping times, which have plateaued at three days, when the competition is doing two days or less.

A BPR initiative revealed that the process design for shipping was the bottleneck. Orders flowed through multiple departments with corresponding handoffs and redundant approvals. Instead of refining each step, the company opted to redesign the process from scratch. They implemented a cross-functional fulfillment team that has process ownership over the entire order lifecycle.

IT systems were consolidated to remove redundant data entries, and predictive analytics were leveraged to pre-stage hot-selling items. The business saw its cycle time go from three days to under 24 hours, a result that incremental improvements couldn’t have achieved.

BPR and Continuous Improvement

I understand the impression you might get from BPR is that continuous improvement has proven to be ineffective. That said, BPR isn’t a complete replacement for continuous improvement techniques, but rather a complement. They’re two sides of the same coin.

Organizations should still make use of continuous improvement to refine and sustain performance within the existing framework of their processes. However, when the framework proves to be the limiting factor, then you’ll want to make use of BPR to reset the slate and start anew.

Making use of both approaches, and knowing when to optimize and when to overhaul, is your best bet for sustainable performance gains.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

Looking for a little more? You might want to consider how Lean Six Sigma can transform security operations for your technology stack by reducing false positives. Making use of the principles, teachings, and tools of Lean Six Sigma can increase accuracy and reduce guesswork when it comes to your security detection needs.

Additionally, you might want to take a closer look at how Six Sigma is quantified. Understanding the performance of any initiatives and being able to see your return on investment is vital for continued success and stakeholder buy-in.

Conclusion

When incremental improvements aren’t delivering value, it doesn’t signal failure. Instead, it is a sign that current process designs have reached their natural limitations. Business Process Reengineering offers a powerful means of busting through barriers, working from a clean slate to redefine what’s possible for a given process.

Organizations looking to maintain those gains aren’t going to jettison continuous improvement, but rather should approach problems from the perspective of whether a process needs to improve or transform.