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Implementing business process re-engineering.

Article Excerpt
Introduction

This checklist provides an outline guide, as a synthesis of best practice, to the key stages in implementing Business Process Re-engineering (BPR).

Successful re-engineering requires a clear understanding that:

a) organisations should be process- not function- driven;

b) processes must be built around the customer; and

c) staff involvement at all stages of design, planning, implementation and maintenance is a prerequisite for success.

Although there have been many BPR-driven successes, there has also been criticism of the relatively high failure rate as well, where companies have not obtained the expected results. Reasons put forward for failure include: confusing downsizing with changing the way things are done; too much emphasis on reducing staff, poor redesign of processes; continuing with a departmental, rather than a processdriven, customer-focused culture; introducing new technology in isolation; and, most critically, failing to involve staff at every stage.

National Occupational Standards for Management and Leadership

This checklist has relevance to the following standards:

C: Facilitating change, units 4, 5, and 6

F: Achieving results, units 3, 7, and 10

Definition

Hammer and Champy, two of its leading exponents, have defined BPR as:

"The fundamental rethinking and radical design of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service and speed."

Re-engineering is, therefore, a way of initiating and controlling change processes through imaginative analysis and systematic planning.

A process can be defined as a series of linked activities that transform one or more inputs into one or more outputs.

In 2001, Hammer restated that BPR is just as valid...

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