Business   Process   Review

Efficient and effective business processes are critical to any business that hopes to maintain, or improve, its competitive position. The way an enterprise structures and manages its business processes has a great impact on improving quality, time, costs and resulting profits. As customers’ expectations have increased, so has the need to become focused on providing customer value. At the same time there has been an increased demand for continued product development, cost control, and shorter cycle times.

Few enterprises pay enough attention to process research and development. The traditional organization of business activities into separate functions such as sales, purchasing, inventory management, production, and distribution may be inadequate to support the cross-functional needs, and the company’s business processes may need to be redesigned.

Although all BPR projects are unique, most of them share the following six characteristics:

    1.   There is a fundamental rethinking of the way in which activities
          are carried out and work gets done;
    2.  There is a structural reorganization with changes to existing jobs;
    3.  There are new information technologies, taking advantage of decreasing
          costs and increasing functionality, to improve access to information
          and speed of decision making;
    4.  There is a new value system, focusing on value from the customer’s viewpoint and on employee empowerment;
    5.  There is a new performance measurement system to measure both processes and outputs; and
    6.  BPR is carried out through teamwork.

Business processes should be designed to focus on the enterprise’s value proposition. For example, an enterprise that is competing on the basis of customer service will redesign its business processes with customer service as the primary goal, while an enterprise competing on product quality will redesign its business processes accordingly.

BPR focuses on achieving dramatic, breakthrough improvements in the effectiveness and efficiency of business operations.