Key Points

• Continuous improvement has limits where incremental changes no longer yield worthwhile results.
• BPR provides a radical reset, allowing teams to redesign processes from the ground up with a clean slate.
• Understanding the warning signs of a process that is sliding out of control is crucial for knowing when to pivot from continuous improvement to BPR.

Streamlining and optimizing processes sees businesses reaching for known, trusted methodologies in continuous improvement like Six Sigma, Lean, and Kaizen. Over time, teams root out waste, guarantee consistency, and climb closer toward process excellence and overall stability. However, when margins begin tightening, you might see those gains start to plateau, and those incremental changes might not move the needle.

When organizations are faced with a scenario where continuous improvement no longer works, they’re only left with one viable option: Business Process Reengineering (BPR). BPR offers a radical alternative to a process, not just a set of tweaks and fixes. Starting from a clean slate allows teams to start fresh and reimagine how the process should be for the overall strategic goals of their organizations. Today, we’re looking at some key indicators in continuous improvement no longer working, and how to avoid common pitfalls.

The Limits of Continuous Improvement

Continuous improvement is a powerful means of keeping operational excellence in mind. That said, it does have limits. There is quite a bit of power in designing your corporate culture around continuous improvement, experimentation, and steady gains. As we’ve noted, continuous improvement will eventually reach a point of diminishing returns.

You might see that the easy fixes for your continuous improvement efforts start to disappear. Time and energy expended to see any sort of gains increases, taking a disproportionate investment to continue adding value to a given process. You might also find structural constraints starting to arise. Processes are a product of the time they were designed in, and some of the larger inefficiencies you find might be a result of legacy routing, rigid siloing, or outdated technology stacks.

Issues also arise when considering the larger shifts in your market. Customer demands rarely stay static, as anyone can attest. That said, what once might have been nominal for overall strategic operations slowly becomes obsolete. You simply aren’t staying viable in a competitive market. In such cases, modernizing the old might be more expensive than simply starting from scratch.

Understanding BPR: Radical Steps For Strategic Alignment

Business Process Reengineering emerged in the 1990s as a methodology intended for radical redesign. It isn’t content with imply improving existing steps or processes, but rather fundamentally rethinking how work is done at the granular level.

While continuous improvement focuses on gradual, incremental gains, BPR challenges assumptions and aims for dramatic breakthroughs in performance. This is further reflected in the cost, speed, quality, cycle time, and customer satisfaction of successful BPR implementations.

BPR isn’t intended for all scenarios by any means. It carries a significant amount of risk, greater disruption to the workforce, and requires complete alignment between leadership, stakeholders, and the workforce. Further, you’ll have to engage in strong change management strategies to navigate any BPR project, given how damaging it could potentially be to your frontline employees.

That said, it might be your only chance if you’ve exhausted all possible avenues of improvement for a process.

Continuous Improvement vs. BPR: Head-to-Head

Still curious about what differentiates these approaches? Take a look at the table below to get to grips:

As you might imagine, this isn’t a true shootout necessarily. Both of these approaches can be complementary when used together. You might make use of BPR to generate a new baseline and then make use of continuous improvement strategies to maintain and optimize the redesign.

Warning Signs That a Process Isn’t Seeing Improvement

So, when do you start reaching for BPR? It might not seem clear-cut at first glance, but there are some telltale signs that a process is resulting in inefficiencies. You might notice bottlenecks arising from cross-functional handoffs that continuous improvement cycles can’t touch. A bigger sign is a complete flattening of performance metrics, as they reach a plateau, even as your organization is investing significant man-hours and resources.

Major shifts in the current market conditions can make workflows obsolete. You might find yourself chafing against technological constraints. Legacy systems simply cannot keep up with the demands of your organization. Processes have grown overly complex, leading to specialized routing, exceptions, and ad-hoc solutions that make the process extremely fragile and difficult to quantify.

Further, you might see a migration of process ownership, especially when undergoing a merger or acquisition. The old design simply doesn’t align with the combined strategic outlooks from both organizations.

A Simple Roadmap for BPR

If you’re ready to get started with BPR, you can make use of this streamlined, top-level sequence:

• Select Candidate Processes: Look for processes that have high strategic worth, wide impact, or flagging performance.
• Analyze As-Is: Map your current process in painstaking detail, track metrics, pain points, root causes, and gather stakeholder feedback.
• Challenge Assumptions: Question each step of your process, consider current roles, look at alternative flow, and consider whether automation or technology can serve as an enabler.
• Simulate Alternatives: This is the time to perform pilot runs, simulated models, or other means of simulating a workflow to compare designs.
• Plan Transition and Manage Change: Plan a phased rollout, implement training plans, engage stakeholders, and develop whatever rollback contingencies are needed.
• Implement: Rigorously track metrics, feedback loops, and conduct retrospectives to make sure the redesigned process sticks.
• Handoff to CI: After the process proves to be stable, let your continuous improvement teams take over for incremental refinements and to maintain gains.

This basic framework aligns with most classical approaches to BPR. The emphasis should remain on customer outcomes, risk mitigation, and stakeholder buy-in.

Risks and Pitfalls: What to Avoid

As we’ve touched on a few times, BPR isn’t without its risks. Business Process Reengineering is radical by design, but the risks are substantially higher as a result. Resistance to change is the death knell for any attempted implementation of BPR, which is readily counteracted with open communication and feedback.

Scope creep is a poison pill for any project, and when you’re radically redesigning a process from the ground up, you don’t want to reinvent the wheel. Focus on what needs adjustment first, rather than attempting to do everything.

Pilot projects are heavily recommended, along with making use of any sort of fallback options. This helps to keep disruptions to a minimum. You’ll also want to define clear performance metrics, so you can validate success further down the line. Finally, without leadership commitment, your newly designed processes are likely to revert to the same old patterns.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

Ready to keep going? You might want to take a closer look at how you can clear your items backlog with BPR. As we’ve covered at length today, BPR is a fantastic way of reinventing processes from scratch. If you’ve got work piling up, there’s an inefficiency somewhere.

If you’re struggling with service delays, you might need to make use of Lean Six Sigma to get to grips with things. Lean Six Sigma takes the best of Lean and Six Sigma to eliminate waste and redundancies for more capable, agile processes.

Conclusion

Continuous improvement is a workhorse when looking at any sort of process improvement. That said, you’ve got operational ceilings to consider. When you’ve hit the upper limit of what is capable with a given process as it sits, it might be time to start taking a look at radically redesigning it through BPR. It isn’t so much a question of which is better for getting processes on track, but rather understanding the distinct advantages presented by both approaches.