PROCESS RE-ENGINEERING

Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) is a management practice in which the related tasks required to obtain a specific business outcome are redesigned in a major way. A big aim of BPR is to analyze the workflow within and in between business functions in order to optimize the end-to-end business process and eliminate tasks that hinder performance or provide the customer with no value. The use of IT to automate and put into place steps, that have been found to be central to BPR initiatives.

The concept of BPR was laid out in a 1990 Harvard Business Review article, "Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate" by the late Michael Hammer, a management author and professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hammer stated that the usual methods for boosting performance had failed to yield the improvements enterprises needed to operate in the 1990s. Product development cycle times were, in fact, extremely slow, order fulfillment error rate was high and inventory levels were not consistent with the demand in the majority of the companies. As a result, enterprises were ill prepared to succeed in a time of rapidly changing technologies, rising customer expectations and global competition. On top of that, IT had failed to improve results in performance or customer service because it was being used to simply automate existing processes. Companies needed to thoroughly reassess whether their processes were providing value and rethink how technology could be used to create new ways to work.

The principles of business process reengineering were laid out by Hammer and organizational theorist James Champy in "Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution," which became a national bestseller. To achieve significant improvement in quality, time management, speed and profitability, the authors urged businesses to follow seven principles: Organize around outcomes, not tasks.

Identify all the processes in an organization and prioritize them in order of redesign urgency. Integrate information processing work into the real work that produces the information. Treat geographically dispersed resources as though they were centralized. Link parallel activities in the workflow instead of just integrating their results. Put the decision point where the work is performed and build control into the process. Capture information once and at the source.

Steps to business process redesign

The business community's enthusiasm and the sheer welcome for business process reengineering in the 1990s generated many interpretations for how radical a change should/could be implemented. Thomas Davenport, a professor at Babson College who collaborated with Hammer before developing his own approach to BPR, used the term business process redesign rather than reengineering and provided business leaders with concrete advice, emphasizing the value of prototypes, simulations and tests Davenport's popular book, written with James Short, laid out a five-step approach to radically change workflow: Develop the business vision and process objectives. Identify the processes to be redesigned. Understand and measure the existing processes. Identify IT levers. Design and build a prototype of the new process.

The BPR process has been a concept that is comparatively new and after a lot of work that has been going on, is now reaching the level of what the forefathers of this steps envisioned it to be.