Business Process Re-engineering involves the fundamental redesign of core business processes in order to radically improve productivity, efficiency and quality. If executed correctly, Business Process Re-engineering can be a game-changer to your organization. Yet, considering that the cost and investment of such a change is vast, it is vital that a BPR project is examined thoroughly before implementation.
The Place to Start: Solid Foundations
Having solid foundations is a must. Therefore, you will first off need to assess your current business situation in order to evaluate where you are standing, and respectively identify the need to change. How is the business performing against expectations? How is it performing against competitors? Is the business utilizing its full potential? Once you have answered these questions you will need to come up with a plan of how Business Process Re-engineering will help you boost business performance. Remember that you will need to justify and explain your reasoning to top management in order for the project to roll out.
Get their right team together
Once your plan is in place you will need to devise a team of professionals to lead this project. It is vital that you select highly trained, motivated individuals that know how to handle a re-engineering project. You should also set weekly and monthly meetings in order to monitor the process and resolve promptly any problems that may occur.
Define your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
This is one of the most critical steps. Here, you will need to address your KPIs according to what you want to achieve. For example, if your business Process Re-engineering project is all about improving manufacturing productivity and quality, you should be aiming at reducing cycle times and defect rate. During this stage, you will need to examine each process separately. A business process flowchart to visualize all business processes will come in handy at this time.
Implementation
Having everything down, it is now time to begin implementing your new solution. At this stage is important to start implementing the Business Project Re-engineering plan at a small scale. If everything is working smoothly you can then start scaling up.
Measuring results
Once the project is completed it is thereafter vital to go back and compare your performance. Answering the questions below will give a first estimation of the Business Process Re-engineering project. Yet doing this once is not enough. It is important that you keep monitoring performance and comparing it to initial.
- How are KPIs performing? How much has the productivity improved?
- Did you face any problems? If yes, how serious were they and how did they affect performance?
- Have your costs been reduced? Have you encountered any other costs you didn’t expect along the way?
- What could have been improved? Was anything missed? Are there any processes that can be further improved?
- Have errors been minimized?
- Was there uplift in sales and profit?
- Have all employees been engaged within the project? Is everyone aware of the changes and their new responsibilities?
- Assess the quality of the finished output. Is the end consumer satisfied?