Hammer and Champy describe Business Process Engineering as
‘the fundamental reconsideration and the radical redesign of organizational processes, in order to achieve drastic improvement of current performance in cost, services and speed’.
BPR has a bad rep as it has often been used as an excuse for mass layoffs.
Regardless, the concept is key to modern professional success.
Radical redesign and drastic improvement is a disruptive measure for when a major lack of competitive advantage is found.
Rather than splitting the company into functional departments (production, accounting, marketing, etc.)…
…BPR considers the complete chain of processes (the Value Chain comes to mind, or SIPOC Analysis), where materials sourcing transitions to production, moving to marketing and distribution.
‘One should rebuild the company into a series of processes’.
An excellent directive.
To help achieve that in the most effective way, I recommend the Theory of Constraints (constraints management).
Constraints Management also takes a holistic approach… with the general goal of finding constraints (or leverage points) within a system, and to elevate the constraint by investing into it so that its constraint on the system is lifted.
This is known as ‘global optima’ (improving the whole) versus ‘local optima’… where functions or departments or processes are optimised independently, regardless of their overall value contribution to the throughput of the system or business.[widget id="ad-continue-management"]ad-continue-management[/widget]
As a New Professional, such concepts and systems crucial for today’s evolving business innovation.
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