Business Process Re-engineering 

Introduction to the Topic

Business Process Re-engineering:-

Reengineering is the fundamental rethinking and redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service and speed. (Hammer & Champy, 1993)

Business Process Reengineering is an approach to the positioning of a business enterprise by essentially redesigning the structure of the business from the ground up. This radical approach seeks to interpret the standard business model in a new way, making more efficient use of available resources by seeing the function and purpose of those resources in new ways. The working structure for Business Process Reengineering is examined in great deal in a 1993 work entitled Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution.

The architects of Business Process Reengineering are Michael Hammer and James Champy. Throughout the later 1980s, Champy and Hammer worked to define the process that would allow businesses to depart from using a time-honored but possibly no longer timely model, and build something new and radical. This approach did not necessarily call for the complete abandonment of all aspects of the standard business model. However, the approach did call for redefining each component in the model and altering the function in a manner that would produce a business structure relevant for a new age.

Over the years, Business Process Reengineering has been known by many different titles. In some instances, the process is known simply as BPR. At other times, the approach has been called Business Process Redesign, Business Transformation, and Business Process Change Management. All these titles do speak to the foundational tenet of the process, in that the idea is to free a business from following the same old structure, simply because that is the way it has always been done. Instead, Business Process Reengineering, under all its different names, supports tearing down the business structure to the foundation and building it anew.

One of the main tools that Business Process Reengineering identifies as an agent for change is the technology of the new millennium. This means that much of the computer technology that became readily available to even small businesses during the 1990s would help business owners to rethink how to structure their businesses. Some examples of how this has proven to be true include shared databases, communication networks that allow real-time interaction with multiple company sites, and wireless devices that allow work to take place outside the office.

BPR may sometimes be mistaken for the following four tools:

1. Automation is an automatic, as opposed to human, operation or control of a process, equipment or a system; or the techniques and equipment used to achieve this.   Automation is most often applied to computer (or at least electronic) control of a manufacturing process.  

2. Downsizing is the reduction of expenditures in order to become financial stable.  Those expenditures could include but are not limited to: the total number of employees at a company, retirements, or spin-off companies.

3. Outsourcing involves paying another company to provide the services a company might otherwise have employed its own staff to perform.  Outsourcing is readily seen in the software development sector.

4. Continuous improvement emphasizes small and measurable refinements to an organization's current processes and systems. Continuous improvements’ origins were derived from total quality management (TQM) and Six Sigma.  

Need of BPR

The business dynamics today is governed by factors like new technologies, new competitors and again, new rules of competition. In such an ever-changing business environment, BPR is needed for the following reasons. One, the rapid change in everything itself warrants product development in lesser time, faster product life cycles and hands-on environmental scanning. Secondly, the customer is well informed today and further; the organizations need to delight the customer rather than just satisfying. Lastly, today’s intense competition demands the business processes at par with the ‘best practices’ prevalent in the industry. Also, the business models have to be focused on individual market segment the organization is targeting. The need for BPR thus can be assigned to three C’s viz.; Change, Customer and Competition.

Key steps involved in Business Process Reengineering

1. Defining the purpose and goal of the BPR project;

2. Defining the scope of the project so as to include (or exclude) activities; A flowchart of the activities can assist to define the scope of the project

3. Identifying the requirements that will meet the needs of the clients

4. Assess the environment – the position of competitors, prospective changes in technology, legislation or socio-economic factors

5. Redesign the business processes and activities in light of the above

6. Implement the redesigned processes

7. Monitor the success/ failure of the redesign.