As a company scales, so does process complexity. And without reevaluation and optimization, this can quickly become a tangle of inefficient tools and workflows you can’t unravel.
While at times overwhelming, business process reengineering (BPR) is crucial for avoiding this chaos. It involves stepping back to map out and reflect on current processes, finding ways to adjust them to improve overall team efficiency and productivity.
BPR involves evaluating and radically redesigning business processes to make workflows more efficient and effective. Instead of making improvements through small, iterative changes, this method requires adjusting broad processes that greatly impact the organization’s success. This might mean automating manual tasks to reduce the required steps to complete specific procedures or eliminating entire workflows.
BPR methodology typically involves five structured steps that guide organizations through transforming their core processes.
Determine what you want to achieve via this reengineering process, like which processes you’d like to target and what your optimal productivity-improvement goals are. You might create a roadmap that showcases these goals and the tasks necessary to achieve them, adjusting as you complete the rest of the reengineering process.
Now, map the processes you’ve decided to focus on to better understand their current state. You might create flowcharts that showcase each step or list each necessary task in a roadmap. Also identify any tools and technology needed to complete each step — you can evaluate how effective these are in the next step.
Working with all relevant process teammates, analyze your flowcharts to determine the following:
You might also conduct employee surveys to gather more qualitative data about how staff feel regarding each process.
Address each insufficiency to improve the process, trying these changes out until you end up with a more efficient workflow.
Also consider where you can switch out tools and automate tasks to increase team productivity. You might test several tools to determine the one that suits your team’s preferences, sending out surveys after each test run to glean and implement their insights.
Be sure to conduct a thorough risk analysis before implementation. It’s essential to know why strategic plans fail and how to avoid issues.
Create and execute a change management plan that involves checking how process changes are going. This plan should begin with leadership clearly outlining adjustments and why they’re making them, as well as offering training where necessary.
Most top companies, at one point or another, consider BPR to improve key performance processes that could affect their business. Applications vary, but common use cases include:
Like every process improvement methodology, BPR shines in certain use cases and falls short in others. Here are some advantages and disadvantages of conducting this analysis and process overhaul.
Amazon is a prime example of BPR in the ecommerce industry. The company has continuously employed BPR principles, like implementing advanced automation and robotics in fulfillment centers to speed up production.
These robots work alongside human employees to pick, pack, and ship products more efficiently. With this BPR initiative, Amazon drastically reduced delivery times and optimized inventory management. More broadly, Amazon’s commitment to BPR and idea management process initiatives has enabled the company to scale and remain a global leader in the B2C industry.
Once you’ve decided on a process to improve, use Roadmunk by Tempo to create and share intuitive strategic roadmaps that clarify this new workflow. Then, use Timesheets by Tempo to glean valuable insights regarding task and project timelines, using this data to further improve team workflows. Sign up today.
