How to improve your work with business process reengineering
Your business is making significant progress. You can also reach your aims, but the problem is about how you reach them. Business processes play a significant role in achieving goals, but they are not as effective as you would like them to be.
Making changes to the process becomes increasingly challenging as your business grows due to habits and investments in old ways. In fact, we cannot make real improvements in processes without making changes. That's why business processes have to be reengineered thoroughly, trying to avoid business process degradation.
What is Business Process Reengineering
You may have recently heard about such a term as Business Process Reengineering (BPR), but what is it and how can it be useful for your organization?
Business Process Reengineering is about recreating and modifying a core business process to improve product production, quality or reduce costs. One of BPR's primary objectives is to analyze workflow processes within and across business functions to optimize the end-to-end business process.
Essentially, business process reengineering helps to:
When you need it
When an organization grows, it becomes harder to avoid a business process degradation. It also needs more time to completely reengineer its processes. However, the necessity of Business Process Reengineering is obvious to stay competitive among others in the labor market.
To understand whether your company needs a BPR, pay attention to the factors listed below:
If you recognize your problems in these points, then you confidently can say that you need to implement BPR.
Steps of BPR
If you consider that implementation of Business Process Reengineering is in need, then follow these steps to make your process management functionate properly:
1. First of all, map the actual status of your business processes
A great start would be to collect data from all resources. The main point is to understand how your processes are performing at this moment.
2. Analyze and identify any gaps or breakdowns
Find errors that hinder business process to work correctly. For example, some deficiencies do not allow a free flow of the process and make delays.
3. Identify and validate areas of improvement
Make sure that every step is absolutely necessary for your pending business process. For instance, if you get used to waste your time notifying all the customers personally on a regular basis, better try to convey information automatically on email.
4. Future-state process mapping
Make a new process that would guide you on how to improve your business process and solve your problems. Identify KRI`s for each step of this process. And don't be afraid of creating an entirely new process that will surely work well. For example, you can create a correcting Serie at IXORD and follow step by step without fear that you will forget something.
5. Implement the new process
Ensure your dependencies and resources are in place to successfully implement your changes. Make sure that all the participants are informed about changes. Continue only when everybody knows how this new process works and agrees with execution. You can also use our platform IXORD to notify members of the new process in a quick way. There is no need to make a new chat for employees responsible for the process - you can chat with each other in your Serie chat.
6. And finally, evaluate the performance
Monitor the performance of the new process and use your KPIs to evaluate the impact against the initial workflow.
Examples and use cases
Ford Motor Company. This is an evergreen of all the BPR examples.
Back in the 1980s, the U.S. auto industry was in a depression, trying to reduce costs. Ford decided to look at some of its departments for inefficiencies. One of their findings was that they had a real gap in the accounts payable department: it had a whopping head count of 500. To compare with, their Japanese competitor Mazda operated with an Accounts Payable team of only 5 employees.
As a result, Ford's management has set a measurable goal of reducing the number of accounts payable clerks by hundreds of employees. After that, they launched a business process re-engineering initiative to understand why the department was so overstaffed.
Ford has made a hypothesis — if they rethink the way Accounts Payable creates value, then they might restructure their entire billing approach and therefore save a lot of money.Ford Motor put this hypothesis into practice, modeled on its competitor's guide, and eventually reduced its workforce by 75% with invoiceless processing.
Use the opportunity
Take a look at your company or department. What processes take a lot of time? Do you notice that customers are not fully satisfied? Why do your employees spend almost all their time in meetings ? Why does it take a lot of time to give the task to the performer? You really have many opportunities to improve your process management - you deserve to do it easier and better. Start solving your biggest problems in the near future and make sure you are viewing your processes on a regular schedule.Integrated workflow automation platform provides a powerful and intuitive way to create complicated workflows, forms and portals for business processes.
