Nowadays, some companies implement Process Re-engineering to attain quick savings and achieve the short term profits they have always wanted to make. Thinking good about this progress, they go to another ambition only to find that soon they are confronted with many of the same difficulties they believed they had cleared up. Now they are challenged with re-engaging the staff, incurring additional costs, to fix issues that may directly have been identified and dealt with without the loss of customer satisfaction had they originally planned for continuous growth.
Business Process Re-engineering simplified
Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) is a complete process demanding a change in the primary way business processes are done. BPR recognizes unnecessary or repetitive activities and reduces them. Wherever feasible, it takes standard procedures and automates them. To achieve, it needs you to have a thoroughgoing and complete agreement of existing processes. Using this in-depth information allows for an examination of how well to make each piece of the method more efficiently, while always focusing on customer comfort.
What is needed to succeed?
To achieve BPR, traditional thinking and management functions must give way to empowered leadership and think “outside the box.” The exchange of information at all levels throughout the organization is essential. It begins with implementing goals and objectives for each process, defining roles and detailing shared strategies. This step is necessary to the success of a BPR action. Management must discharge departmental mandates, spare the work from the departmental accounts and remove strict operational control. These are anti-productive to BPR initiatives.
The next step is empowerment, allowing employees to have a say on how the business will work efficiently. To make sure that this happens, senior management must agree to commit to several things. The most important commitment: providing and supporting the impetus for the initiative. Once started, they can’t look back, this will likely be the most difficult obstacle management will encounter. Employees must see and understand that management supports employee participation and agree changes must be made. Management can’t disregard suggestions; even those they feel are frivolous and must provide positive feedback to encourage continued participation and success.
Next, management should realize that there will be time commitments involved both for themselves and for the staff. They must be willing to share some of their time with the staff doing the process investigation and mapping, for not only are the daily functions of the business examined and mapped but the management services as well. If there is a commitment to enhancing the overall functionality of the business, then no area can be left unmapped.
Many tasks are involved in Business Change. The first step towards success is planning and empowerment. The balance of tasks involved in a successful BPR implementation requires a fair amount of strategic thought and planning. Positive attitude, process thinking, avoiding the temptation of quick savings by eliminating staff, and being concentrated and on task, are the heart of the process and can be difficult. Remember, these are essential qualities in a productive transformation of the company.
