Business Process Reengineering: The Mystical Code to Crack Success in Evolving New Markets

Moore Stephens KSC

 In order to achieve a better position for themselves in today's business environment, companies are going through major structural changes. One of the most commonly used strategies for radically changing a company is Business Process Re-engineering (BPR).

At some time or another, most companies will likely experience a point in their development when business process management (BPM) will need to be adjusted in order to support growth, mitigate a challenge or respond to market trends.

Undoubtedly, the BPR strategies promise potential as seen in the upward growth in the performances of various companies who adopted it. Still pertaining to some failures, cautions are mandatory.

We all hear the concept of process re-engineering and the concept was adopted at a global level in an almost mystical way in past years in economies all over the world, however process re-engineering is present in our history since the dawn of time, and the only thing that has changed in it is the way we look at it.

This concept can be also successfully applied in any economy in order to increase their results, by minimizing the cost which is the goal for any company in any market.

In order to better understand the mechanics of process re-engineering we have to break it into 3 smaller concepts that we like to call “WHO”.

 
1.Why we need it?

 2.How to do it?

 3.Output

 
1.Why we need it?
We live in an ever-changing world and if we project the past 20 years evolution rate to the next 20 years is easy to understand that we must adapt quickly to the ever-changing dynamic of our world.

This is where the process re-engineering comes in, reinventing the way we do things in order to obtain better results.

How to do it- By observing, learning and applying. The key is the identification of the weak link or links in our business and finds ways to improve it/them.

 

2. What do we want to accomplish?

There is a fine line between business process re-engineering and business process obliteration, and we have carefully chosen our direction in order obtain the expected value added, without cause imbalance to other processes


There can be various directions for our process re-engineering, such as:

  • increase our profit
  • increase our business
  • increase our customer satisfaction

Choosing a direction will change dramatically the approach.
 

3. The Output

The output is not only about obtaining a result but is also about measuring the added value of our process re-engineering and balance it with the other processes and make sure that the improvement will last because after all, our aim is to improve our business by improving our processes.

At a technical level, a general approach would divide the business process re-engineering into 4 phases:

Launch phase

  • Defining the project

  • Information request

  • Kick-off meeting with the client and the team members
     

As-Is Phase

  • Data gathering

  • Process mapping

  • Findings assessment

  • Business impact analysis of findings
     

The Design Phase

  • Design the desired changes in the process

  • Discuss the design of the governance

  • Findings assessment

  • Business impact analysis of findings

  • Implementation phase

  • Planning of change in process

  • Implement change in process

  • Revision of the change process

  • Monitor the output to measure improvement
     

In other words, business process re-engineering represents the natural alignment to the surrounding environment’s evolution of every healthy economy regardless if it’s about a country, a company or our own day-to-day living. Not only it will improve the output for target process but will also enhance the performance in every aspect of the business.”