The following are strategies for Business Process Re-engineering that we’ve found to be effective on a variety of projects.
Business Process Re-engineering involves redesigning the core organizational processes so as to enhance product quality and output or reduce costs. The goal is to research company workflows to get processes that aren’t efficient then optimize those processes to eliminate tasks that don’t offer any value.
Business Process Re-engineering isn’t a simple task and may be costly, time-consuming and risky. During this article, we are getting to dig a touch deeper into a couple of strategies and steps you’ll use to successfully re-engineer your process.
- Know your requirements
The first step for business process re-engineering, or BPR, is knowing your requirements.
You have to know both a benchmark of where your organization is, a crystal-clear idea of how work gets done today, and a minimum of the beginning of scoping out why you would like to try to do BPR.
One trap we frequently see is that companies have the thought to require a PBR project before they need an understanding of what problem they need .
For instance, one company might prefer to engage in a BPR project because they feel that their systems might be improved.
And while optimization is usually welcome, there are often faster and cheaper ways to try to do it than BPR.
Therefore, organizations have to do two things for a successful BPR project.
First, define their requirements to support a benchmark, current state, and a perfect future state.
Second, define the scope of the project, outlining exactly why you’re planning on doing this and what the justification is for further investment.
From these early discussions, you’ll extract a full project brief and act strategically.
Tips to find out your requirements
- Map your current requirements
You need to know where you’re , which means mapping your existing processes.
First, document your formal workflow. How is the figure alleged to be completed? What’s the method that creates work?
Second, document your informal workflow. No workflow is every 100% followed. Workarounds emerge, bottlenecks are mitigated, people meet in hallways to debate changes.
You need to seek out and document the way things are literally done, both because this may assist you uncover what must be fixed, but also will show you where your current systems are lacking.
- Benchmark your current processes
You need to understand what the present performance level is predicated on your business objective and KPIs (more on these during a minute). the rationale you would like to understand is that this is often the benchmark you’ll measure it against to ascertain if your new business processes are effective or not.
Benchmarking is typically a comparatively simple matter. Either you review historic performance and, once you get to linking a business strategy, you merely choose the proper metrics.
Alternatively, you break your overall process into component parts and find benchmarks within all .
- Ask end users and executives
Involve executive leadership and end users early and you’re tons more likely to achieve success . Leadership can assist you understand your processes and, as we’ll see, involving them early increases buy-in significantly. End users offer invaluable insight into how you’ll improve the method from an on-the-ground perspective.
- Link your business process re-engineering to a business strategy
We mentioned it earlier but it’s definitely worth repeating.
It’s absolutely essential that you simply link your business process re-engineering project to an underlying business objective.
There are a few reasons for this.
First, it’ll make sure that you don’t lose funding/enthusiasm for it halfway through.
Second, it means your BPR project is making a true contribution to rock bottom line, which is the point of really any BPR initiative (for nonprofits, you’ll switch “bottom line” for “mission”).
And finally, it’ll assist you define scope. It’s easy to urge analysis paralysis when it involves BPR because numerous processes look ‘broken’ once you really start to tug at them.
Linking your BPR project to a selected business objective ensures that you simply can define the scope of your project with an easy question:
“Does changing [process] impact [business objective] during a meaningful, measurable way?”
Tips to linking BPR and business strategy
- Identify a BPR executive champion
In addition to helping you define requirements, an executive champion are often tremendously helpful to aligning your BPR goals throughout the organization. Their bird’s-eye view of the org can quickly identify key partners and blockers you would possibly otherwise miss.
- Identify a meaningful goal
We’ll get more into measurement shortly, but it’s worth mentioning here. It doesn’t matter if you’re using the SMART goal framework (our personal favourite) or another structure, the business goal that you simply are addressing must be clear, defined, and measurable. It also helps if you’ll assign a timeframe thereto.
- Control, measure, and iterate
The final step in building an excellent re-engineering project is controlling, measuring, and iterating on improvements.
This is the natural progression from the benchmarking and business goal tactics we mentioned earlier. By measuring against your benchmark values and linking your measured attributes to an overarching business strategy, you’ll directly see the impact of BPR on your business.
What’s more, this allows you to identify what’s working and what isn’t in your new process. instead of ripping everything out every few years and replacing it, you’ll optimize and improve slowly over time.
In software terms, it’s a touch bit like waterfall development vs continuous development. For ongoing optimization, continuous improvement is thanks to go.
What’s more, there’s zero percent chance that you’ll get everything perfect the first time. a number of the new systems and workflows are going to be brilliant. Others will hit unexpected snags and bottlenecks.
With careful and meaningful tracking against a baseline, you’ll constantly improve your processes since you a transparent picture of what success seems like .
Tips for a way to regulate, measure, and iterate
- Results-driven rewards
People and systems will achieve the objectives that they’re incentivized to realize . This might sound obvious, but it is often a tenaciously difficult needle to string.
One example is land. Imagine, as an example , you’re selling your house. you would like to urge the simplest price, and naturally, assume your land agent does too. But that’s not strictly true. Your land agent wants to urge the simplest price fast.
Let’s say they get a 2.5% commission. you’ll sell your house for $500,000 in two months or $700,000 in four months.
For you, it’s a simple decision. except for the important realtor, they could advocate the lower cost, faster, since the difference is merely worth $5,000. they might use those extra two months netting them another $500,000 house sale and cashing a cool $12.5K.
Counter-intuitive incentives like these permeate organizations. So when you’re fixing controls and measurement, confirm you’re truly incentivizing the behaviour you would like .
- Give ownership to groups
In addition to involving stakeholders early, they ought to be involved within the measurement and feedback stages also. By encouraging and working on feedback from team leads, you can:
Take advantage of their expertise and concepts to repeatedly improve processes
Pass ownership (and, ideally, incentives) onto the people that can truly see a change to the business process you’re trying to re-engineer.
- Refocus on the customer
Organizations will always attempt to serve themselves. If left to their own devices, they’ll exert themselves to satisfy their own objectives. That’s why baking in stress on customers / and-stakeholders is important when you’re planning your metrics. specialise in what’s most vital to them, then work back to create your measurement plan.
- OKRs
OKRs, or Objective and Key Results, may be a topic far too large to hide intimately (here’s a full guide if you’re interested). But in short , OKRs are a framework/methodology for turning business strategy into individual metrics. The thought is that a business objective is about senior leaders. Say the target is:
Double the new revenue from small business by the top of the year.
That objective then became key results. Basically, how does one measure doubled revenue from small business? (easy enough, check out revenue from businesses in your takeover target size).
Finally, that OKR is rolled throughout the organization, with each team leader measured on metrics they define to assist them achieve that overall objective, and every team member working with their manager to define personal KPIs that ultimately roll up to the business goal.
When it involves business process re-engineering, by using OKRs to require your defined business objective and align the organization around it, including the systems and processes people use. It is a framework that regulates, measures, and iterates your business processes, ultimately rolling up to hit your defined business objective.
Wrap up
Business process re-engineering tends to be done as a one-off project, run during a silo and made on end-users. The results are a replacement process that either isn’t fit for purpose, fails to unravel the matter, or isn’t followed by the people actually doing the work.
But that doesn’t mean that BPR is useless. If executed effectively, business process re-engineering can’t only improve processes and businesses but actually reinvigorate workers’ engagement with the corporate. By consulting and interesting with meaningful behaviour in a meaningful way, and truly improving the way work is completed , BPR are often incredibly effective.
And by knowing your requirements, linking it to a business goal, and controlling, measuring, and iteratively obsessively, you’ll drive incredible results.
