Business Process Reengineering When to Use It

As companies grow and establish themselves, over time they will have developed a set of processes that are specific to their core business. This set of processes is what defines the company and how it runs their operations. It becomes almost predictable. These processes may be very well suited to run every day activities, and may even be sufficient to cope with changes in the markets they are operating in, however eventually the pace of their competitors and the markets will outrun them. That is, if they do not adapt accordingly and swiftly to these ever present and continuous changes. They will start to notice that they are no longer performing as efficiently as they were doing when they founded the organization.

For an organization to remain competitive or even lead in the markets in which they operate, it is vital to analyze if the foundation on which it was built and as it was once laid out, is still a good match to the current landscape they are in. The methods which have been developed and most likely extended during their existence may need to be reviewed, analyzed and re-built, as they lose efficiency.

This is where Business Process Reengineering - many times abbreviated to BPR - steps in. It is an analytic thinking which helps to understand and view how one can optimize the processes on which the company is built. In other words, optimizing them to today's market conditions, and clearly also to those of tomorrow. Although sometimes people tend to refer to this endeavor as improvement of business processes, for it to be really effective, reengineering is a technique that is way more dramatic than just improving existing processes; it is a complete redesign. This extensive and impactive exercise recognizes and analyzes the core processes, the goals it is trying to achieve, the services and products, and the customers and stakeholders. It will then re-align the business processes to these areas of focus.

The analysis is generally carried out on a broad and wide range of processes, ideally all processes of the enterprise. The reason for doing so is because the intention of the exercise is to make major improvements in the company's presence by incorporating changes that will strip inefficiency from the entire set of processes, i.e. in its totality. This will lead to results with more impact than when assuming an approach of parallel processes being analyzed and optimizing each of them separately and independently. The real and major benefit of the entire undertaking is that by applying a broader and more holistic view, the changes will be bigger than optimizing each process on its own.

Business Process Management Solutions

In designing an environment for the effective performance of individuals working together in groups, a manager's most essential task is to see that everyone understands the groups purposes and objectives and its method of attaining them. If group effort is to be effective, people must know what they are expected to accomplish. This is a function of business process management solutions. Planning plays a pivotal part in attaining the solutions.

Planning involves selecting missions and objectives and the actions to achieve them. It requires decision-making, choosing from among alternative future courses of action. Plans provide a rational approach to pre-selected objectives. Planning bridges the gap from where we are to where we want to go. It makes it possible for things to occur that would not otherwise happen. Although we can seldom predict the exact future, and although factors beyond our control may interfere with the best-laid plans, unless we plan, we are leaving events to chance.

Business process management solutions are an intellectually demanding process. They require that we consciously determine courses of action and base our decisions on purpose, knowledge and considered estimates. Any attempt to control without plans is meaningless, since there is no way for people to tell whether they are going where they want to go (the result of the task of control) unless they first know where they want to go (part of the task of planning). Plans thus furnish the standards of control.

The failure of some managers to recognize that there are a number of different types of solutions has often caused difficulty in making planning effective. It is easy to see that a major program, such as one to build and equip a new factory, is a plan. But a number of courses for future action are also plans. In fact, a plan can encompass any number of courses of future action that clearly show that plans are varied.