Business Process Reengineering (BPR)
BPR is the idea of redesigning processes from scratch, not patching them. It came out of the early 1990s:
- 1990: Michael Hammer, “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate”, Harvard Business Review.
- 1993: Hammer and James Champy, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, defining reengineering as the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in cost, quality, service and speed.
- 1993: Thomas Davenport, Process Innovation: Reengineering Work through Information Technology, treating IT as the enabler of process change.
Ideas that lasted
- Organise work around end-to-end processes, not functions.
- Question the purpose of each step instead of automating it as is.
- Use information technology to change the process, not to speed up the old one.
What went wrong
BPR became associated with large downsizings and many projects that did not deliver; the radical, one-time approach gave way to continuous improvement (kaizen, lean) and to managing processes permanently, which is what BPM stands for. The key lesson: redesign needs process ownership and a monitoring loop afterwards (process-architecture-and-governance, bpm-lifecycle).
When to use it now
Use a radical redesign when the process is fundamentally wrong for current needs or technology (for instance a paper-based approval chain that a new platform makes unnecessary). Use incremental methods when the process is sound but inefficient. The redesign phase of the BPM lifecycle borrows BPR’s questions.
Related
BPM hub, michael-hammer, thomas-davenport, hyperautomation-and-intelligent-automation, worked-example-order-to-cash-redesign
Open items
- Month and issue of the 1990 HBR article were not verified.
Sources
- Hammer, Champy, Reengineering the Corporation, HarperBusiness, 1993: https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780887306402
- Davenport, Process Innovation, Harvard Business School Press, 1993 (ISBN 0875843662)
- UCL e-TERM summary: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/e-term/PRODUCTS/module0/0-3text1.htm