What is the process of business process reengineering?
Business process reengineering is the act of recreating a core business process with the goal of improving product output, quality, or reducing costs. Typically, it involves the analysis of company workflows, finding processes that are sub-par or inefficient, and figuring out ways to get rid of them or change them.Business process reengineering is the act of recreating a core business process with the goal of improving product output, quality, or reducing costs.Typically, it involves the analysis of company workflows, finding processes that are sub-par or inefficient, and figuring out ways to get rid of them or change them.Business process reengineering became popular in the business world in the 1990s, inspired by an article called Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate which was published in the Harvard Business review by Michael Hammer.His position was that too many businesses were using new technologies to automate fundamentally ineffective processes, as opposed to creating something different, something that is built on new technologies.Think, using technology to “upgrade” a horse with lighter horseshoes which make them faster, as opposed to just building a car.In the decades since, BPR has continued to be used by businesses as an alternative to business process management (automating or reusing existing processes), which has largely superseded it in popularity.And with the pace of technological change faster than ever before, BPR is a lot more relevant than ever before.As we’ve mentioned before, business process reengineering is no easy task.Unlike business process management or improvement, both of which focus on working with existing processes, BPR means changing the said processes fundamentally.This can be extremely time-consuming, expensive and risky. Unless you manage to carry out each of the steps successfully, your attempts at change might fail.
What is business process re engineering why it is required?
Business process re-engineering is required in two cases: The organization has discovered some breakthrough methodology which will revolutionize its processes to give it more productivity and efficiency and therefore the entire process needs to be changes.“BPR is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and speed.” Instead of starting with an activity flowchart, corporations are advised to start with a clean slate. They are then told to look into why they perform the tasks the way they do. A Process Engineer will look at the activities to be performed and how they can be engineered to invest minimum resources and get maximum returns.To illustrate the point, let us consider the example of Apple iPod. Apple rethought the way music ought to be made available to the consumers. The changes it brought were:Information Availability: To fundamentally redesign a process, one must know the details involved. Details from internal and external sources must be captured and provided to the relevant people in the required time duration. This helps them to identify the bottlenecks and work around better ways of reaching the desired end.Information Sharing: A BPR project is usually facilitated by a cross functional team. Most of the times, teams are spread across different geographic locations. Information needs to be successfully shared amongst various people to ensure the reengineering goes as planned and without hiccups.Technology as the Solution: The new processes that are developed as a result of BPR initiatives deploy the latest technology to achieve the desired end results. Usually it is e-Commerce, automation or another technology driven solution that is implemented.Business Process Re-engineering has become a very important buzzword in the BPM lexicon. Many corporations who were late in realizing the power and importance of BPM have to undergo re-engineering initiatives to ensure that they are still relevant to the marketplace. Re-engineering initiatives are however expensive and may require certain downtime. This is the reason they are resented by many corporations.
What is the difference between BPI and BPR?
Business Process Improvement is the any improvement in process in a business environment whereas BPR is one of the methodology used for Business Process Improvement. Usually BPR and BPI treated the same. But the difference is in the depth of change. Both BPR and BPI essentially aim to improve the system.But the difference is in the depth of change. ... While BPI or streamlining is done to improve processes within the existing organizational structure, BPR is done to create dramatic improvements to enable the organization break away from conventional wisdom and approaches, thereby creating widespread change.BPI focuses on increasing customer value through improving quality, enhancing service, reducing costs, and/or increasing productivity of activity or business process. BPI initiatives often leverage well-known techniques such as Lean, Six Sigma, Global 8-D, Theory of Constraints, and/or Rummler Bache. These efforts can seek “incremental” improvement over time or “breakthrough” improvement all at once (i.e. a new way to manage the business).BPM is a disciplined management approach and methodology to provide end-to-end process understanding, visibility and control while ensuring effective communication across an organization. BPM combines BPI, performance management and organizational change management with technology to ensure the success and sustainability of process improvements while enabling a process excellence culture. Some organizations discuss BPM as process OR technology, but Centric views BPM as the convergence of process, people AND technology.
