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Process Change>What is Business Process
Re-engineering?
In
a nutshell,
business process reengineering (BPR) is the redesign of
business processes (click to read what is a
process?).
It includes the redesign of systems and organisational
structures. The objective is to achieve a dramatic
improvement in business performance.
The business reasons for making such changes could
include poor financial performance, external
competition, and erosion of market share or emerging
market opportunities.
BPR
is not
- downsizing, restructuring, reorganization, automation,
new technology, etc. It is the examination and change
of five components of the business:
-
Strategy
-
Processes
-
Technology
-
Organisation
-
Culture
In
the extreme,
BPR assumes the current process is irrelevant - it
doesn't work, it's broke and let’s
start over etc. Such a clean sheet enables the
process designers (usually called business analysts) to disassociate themselves from
the current
process (e.g., the “As is” process), and focuses
on a new process (the “To be” process). In a
manner of speaking, it is like projecting yourself into
the future and asking yourself:
-
What should the process look like?
-
What do my customers want it to look like?
-
What do other employees want it to look like?
-
How do the "best-in-the-industry" companies do it?
-
What might we be able to do with new technology?
Such an approach is pictured below.
It begins with identifying the business requirements
(click here to read about) and then using this
information to define the scope (e.g. what area(s) of
work will be
included) and the objectives of your
reengineering project (e.g. what are the aims and what
will it achieve). The next step is to go through a learning
process (with your customers, your employees, your
competitors and non-competitors and also look at
new technology). Using this knowledge you can
create a vision for the future and design new business
processes.
Having defined the "To be” state, you can create
a plan of action based on the gap between your current
processes, technologies and structures, and decide
where you want to go. And it is then a matter of
implementing your solution, by using Project Management
methods.
Go
to
Process Change Knowledge Base
See also
Go to
Analysis Knowledge Base
Go to Project Management Knowledge Base
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