North Bengal International University

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Business Process Reengineering: Introduction

Business process re-engineering (BPR) is a business management strategy

originally pioneered in the early 1990s, focusing on the analysis and design
of workflows and business processes within an organization. BPR aimed to
help organizations fundamentally rethink how they do their work in order to
improve customer service, cut operational costs, and become world-
class competitors
Business process reengineering (BPR) has been receiving attention from
industries as well as the academic community, because it is likely to change
management practice and working processes in organisations in the future.

BPR is known by many names, such as ‘core process redesign’, ‘new industrial
engineering’ or ‘working smarter’. All of them imply the same concept which
focuses on integrating both business process redesign and deploying IT to
support the reengineering work. In this section we attempt to explore two
questions: where does BPR come from and what is involved in BPR

What is BPR?
Generally the topic of BPR involves discovering how business processes
currently operate, how to redesign these processes to eliminate the wasted or
redundant effort and improve efficiency, and how to implement the process
changes in order to gain competitiveness. The aim of BPR, according to
Sherwood-Smith (1994), is “seeking to devise new ways of organising tasks,
organising people and redesigning IT systems so that the processes support the
organisation to realise its goals”.

Definaions
Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is a systematic, disciplined approach to
reducing organizational costs and redundant business processes involving the
analysis of existing human and automated workflows.

When is Business Process Re-Engineering Required?

 Customer complaints and refund requests are rising.
 Staff stress, disputes, and turnover are high.
 Chaos reigns after experienced employees depart or go out on leave.
 Profitability is falling.
 Sales leads are not being followed up upon quickly.
 Corporate governance has been lacking.
 You are struggling with your cash flow.
 Your inventory levels are rising.
 You can’t fill customer orders quickly enough.

6 Essential Steps in Business Process Reengineering (BPR)

To keep the business process reengineering 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:
1. Map the current state of your business processes
2. Analyze them and find any process gaps or disconnects
3. Look for improvement opportunities and validate them
4. Design a cutting-edge future-state process map
5. Operationalize opportunities and develop future changes
6. Implement future state changes and be mindful of dependencies
A business process reengineering (BPR) initiative flops when organizations:
 Apply it to more than one process
 Don’t have long-term, clear goals
 End up with only minor changes to the process
 Don’t dare to put their processes on the anvil
 Apply it continually, reengineering processes yearly or more often
 Focus more on automation than redesign

Core BPR Principles

Think Cross-Functionally. Your process likely touches many departments. If
you only try to change things within one department, your efforts may not make
a difference.
Keep asking “Why” and “What if”. BPR works because it stretches the
boundaries and doesn’t assume the current solution is the only one.
Organize around outcomes, not tasks. Don’t think up a better way to do the
individual tasks in a process. Focus on the outcome and the simplest way to get
there.
Let those closest to the work make the final decisions. There is tremendous
insight in those people who have performed a function a thousand times over.
Ask them how improvements can be made and give them decision-making power.
Capture information once, at the source. Much of the redundancies in
processes involve the manual transfer and resubmission of data. Collect the data
once, and use IT systems to parse it out to every task after that.