Business Process Reengineering (BPR)

Your company is making great progress. You’re meeting goals easily, but the way you meet goals is
where the problem is. Business processes play an important role in driving goals, but they are not as
efficient as you’d like them to be.

Making changes to the process gets more and more difficult as your business grows because of habits
and investments in old methods. But in reality, you cannot improve processes without making changes.
Processes have to be reengineered carefully since experiments and mistakes bring in a lot of confusion

What is business process re-engineering (BPR)?

Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) is the radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic
improvements in critical aspects like quality, output, cost, service, and speed. Business process
reengineering (BPR) aims at cutting down enterprise costs and process redundancies on a very huge
scale.

Is business process reengineering (BPR) same as business process improvement (BPI)?

On the surface, BPR sounds a lot like business process improvement (BPI). However, there are
fundamental differences that distinguish the two. BPI might be about tweaking a few rules here and
there. But reengineering is an unconstrained approach to look beyond the defined boundaries and bring
in seismic changes.

While BPI is an incremental setup that focuses on tinkering with the existing processes to improve them,
BPR looks at the broader picture. BPI doesn’t go against the grain. It identifies the process bottlenecks
and recommends changes in specific functionalities. The process framework principally remains the
same when BPI is in play. BPR, on the other hand, rejects the existing rules and often takes an
unconventional route to redo processes from a high-level management perspective.

BPI is like upgrading the exhaust system on your project car. Business Process Reengineering, BPR is
about rethinking the entire way the exhaust is handled.

Five steps of Business Process Re-engineering (BPR)

To keep business process re-engineering fair, transparent, and efficient, stakeholders need to get a
better understanding of the key steps involved in it. Although the process can differ from one
organization to another, these steps listed below succinctly summarize the process:

Below are the 5 Business Process Re-engineering Steps:

1. Map the current state of your business processes

Gather data from all resources–both software tools and stakeholders. Understand how the process is
performing currently.

2. Analyze them and find any process gaps or disconnects

Identify all the errors and delays that hold up a free flow of the process. Make sure if all details are
available in the respective steps for the stakeholders to make quick decisions.

3. Look for improvement opportunities and validate them

Check if all the steps are absolutely necessary. If a step is there to solely inform the person, remove the
step, and add an automated email trigger.

4. Design a cutting-edge future-state process map

Create a new process that solves all the problems you have identified. Don’t be afraid to design a totally
new process that is sure to work well. Designate KPIs for every step of the process.

5. Implement future state changes and be mindful of dependencies

Inform every stakeholder of the new process. Only proceed after everyone is on board and educated
about how the new process works. Constantly monitor the KPIs.

A real-life example of BPR

Many companies like Ford Motors, GTE, and Bell Atlantic tried out BPR during the 1990s to reshuffle
their operations. The reengineering process they adopted made a substantial difference to them,
dramatically cutting down their expenses and making them more effective against increasing
competition.

The story

An American telecom company that had several departments to address customer support regarding
technical snags, billing, new connection requests, service termination, etc. Every time a customer had an
issue, they were required to call the respective department to get their complaints resolved. The
company was doling out millions of dollars to ensure customer satisfaction, but smaller companies with
minimal resources were threatening their business.

The telecom giant reviewed the situation and concluded that it needed drastic measures to simplify
things–a one-stop solution for all customer queries. It decided to merge the various departments into
one, let go of employees to minimize multiple handoffs and form a nerve center of customer support to
handle all issues.

A few months later, they set up a customer care center in Atlanta and started training their repair clerks
as ‘frontend technical experts’ to do the new, comprehensive job. The company equipped the team with
new software that allowed the support team to instantly access the customer database and handle
almost all kinds of requests.

Now, if a customer called for billing query, they could also have that erratic dial tone fixed or have a new
service request confirmed without having to call another number. While they were still on the phone,
they could also make use of the push-button phone menu to connect directly with another department
to make a query or input feedback about the call quality.
  The redefined customer-contact process enabled the company to achieve new goals.
 Reorganized the teams and saved cost and cycle time
 Accelerated the information flow, minimized errors, and prevented reworks
 Improved the quality of service calls and enhanced customer satisfaction
 Defined clear ownership of processes within the now-restructured team
 Allowed the team to evaluate their performance based on instant feedback

When should you consider BPR?

The problem with BPR is that the larger you are, the more expensive it is to implement. A startup, five
months after launch, might undergo a pivot including business process reengineering that only has
minimal costs to execute.

However, once an organization grows, it will have a harder and more expensive time to completely
reengineer its processes. But they are also the ones who are forced to change due to competition and
unexpected marketplace shifts.

But more than being industry-specific, the call for BPR is always based on what an organization is aiming
for. BPR is effective when companies need to break the mold and turn the tables in order to accomplish
ambitious goals. For such measures, adopting any other process management options will only be
rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Core questions

Before you decide to adopt BPR for functional reshuffling, ask yourself the following questions:

Who are our customers? What values are we offering them?

Are the current processes delivering expected values?
Do the processes need to be redefined or redesigned?
Are the processes in sync with our long-term mission and goals?
How would we handle the existing processes if we were a new company?

If a company concludes that it is, in fact, operating on complacent grounds, it has to identify the right
kind of solution to address the problem or consider BPR for a total overhaul. Done well, BPR’s radical
approach yields dramatic results for a company in terms of improved cycle times, product quality,
productivity, and so on.
Good BPM reduces the need for BPR

The productivity of employees definitely takes a hit during process reengineering. Changes are difficult
to manage and it saves a lot of costs on analysis, reengineering, and documentation. If processes are
managed better during runtime, the need for reengineering is greatly reduced.