Business process reengineering (BPR) is the practice of rethinking and redesigning the way work is done to better support an organization’s mission and reduce costs. – Business process re-engineering – Wikipedia
My Six-Step Process for Re-engineering Business Processes
Step 1: Understand the context
The first step is to understand where the business process fits into the organization as a whole. What are the organization’s vision and mission and how does the business process help to fulfill the mission and vision.
Step 2: Discover the As-Is business process
To understand the existing business process you need to understand the inputs and outputs, stakeholders, activities or steps, metrics, business rules,and timings.
Step 3: Analyze the Business Process
Once the As-Is business process is understood, it is analyzed to see what is working and what isn’t working. Each stakeholder in the process may have different ideas on what can be improved. For each potential improvement, the value of the improvement is tied back to the organization vision and mission. Business processes can be improved by being more efficient, creating more customer value, removing bottlenecks, reducing handoffs, and increasing the value of the output.
The last part of analyzing the business process is determining which of the potential improvements will be focussed on.
Step 4: Innovate the To-Be business process
The new business process is defined to address the potential improvements that have been identified in the prior step. THere will be times when step 3 and step 4 overlap. In designing the new business process, it may uncover other improvements, or the identified improvements are more costly to fix then anticipated.
One critical step in defining the To-Be business process is to incorporate metrics to show that the new business process actually is an improvement.
Step 5: Implement the To-Be business process
The new business process is improved and the associated metrics are started to be collected.
Step 6: Measure and re-evaluate the business process
The metrics are measured to show what is working and what needs improvement. The parts that need improvement will now go back to step 3. Steps 1 and 2 can be skipped because the current business process that has been documented is the As-Is process now.