Business Process Redesign: An Overview

Business and IT are locked in a struggle over who controls the management of business process improvements.Companies are realizing that a good, solid understanding of their processes is essential to achieving any of their performance objectives. Most organizations, if they’re not already doing something [with BPM], are starting to get into it.

The underlying idea behind a Business Process Redesign is that the enormous changes in technology over the last 25 years or so have given us the opportunity to look at processes that are mostly driven by paper. Paper forms to collect information, filing cabinets to store that information, clerical staff to move the information around and enter it into computers. We no longer need to do that with the technology that’s now available to us.

So the question we ask in a BPR is:

Is there a way to take a process that we’ve used for decades and look at it completely differently?

The ATM is a good example of what a BPR might produce. A bank might notice long line-ups, people coming to the teller, presenting pieces of paper, wanting to walk away with money, doing other transactions, and so on. How can they improve service? Someone must have raised their hand at such a meeting and said: ‘You know what? We could make money come out of a brick wall.’ A BPR can produce that kind of radical thinking.

 A BPR is a methodology in itself. We use a very structured process that takes anyone who is prepared to think openly about business processes and leads them through a series of steps which are almost guaranteed to provide a great result, providing the reason the BPR is being undertaken — what we call the Case For Action — is understood. We don’t deal with staffing issues and we don’t suggest the technology that should be used, but we are clear about what the end result should be.

Here is an example for BPR...Acknowledging that students know the courses they’ve taken in high school and the grades they’ve achieved, and acknowledging that the university knows the rules to admission for undergraduate programs, shouldn’t we be able to connect the student with the university’s rules and let the student determine, using a computer, whether or not they are admissible to a program?

The BPR didn’t determine the program or the system that was used. It came up with the concept, the idea, of making it work. Now students don’t have to pay us $100 and wait eight weeks for an answer. It’s more accurate too, as no one has a greater interest in the accuracy of the transcripts than the student...

Yes. The amount of money and time required is unknown when the conceptual design begins. It’s only known when the design is taken and analyzed and broken down into actual projects.

The change management needs to address the behavioral issues in the new process centric environment, for enabling the symbiotic relationship among people, process and technology. In a nutshell, the reengineering engagements try to rediscover and reinvent the businesses for achieving stakeholder delight!!!