Business is a struggle of never-ending hurdles. From the need to offer an outstanding product and service to targeting your potential customers and meeting the changing demands of the market. However, none of these actually matter if your business process gives you a disadvantage. 

This is where the business process re-engineering comes in. This is re-assessing how your business works to produce quality products and services, reduce costs, and be globally competitive.

Now, we will reveal the secret of the top businesses in the world. In this guide, you will learn how and why business process re-engineering is significant for your business.

What Is Business Process Re-engineering?

Business process re-engineering is a business strategy or technique. It aims to recreate a core business process with the goal of improving product output, reducing costs, and improving efficiency.

The Goals of Business Process Re-engineering

Business organisations that seek to continually improve their service and output need to examine their processes to meet the changing market demands.

In shaping new processes or changing existing ones, goals and objectives play a leading role. Learning the list of goals of this business strategy will help you better understand and appreciate its purpose.

• Improve Customer Focus

Redirecting the focus to potential and existing customers is one of the main goals of business process re-engineering. Getting rid of irrelevant processes to provide better customer service advantageously benefits your business in the long run.

• Speed

There are still business organisations especially small businesses that use outdated processes such as manual execution of administrative matters. This process takes long hours of operation thus indicates inefficiency. Investing in redesigning your business process aims to cut down the average cycle time of your operation.

• Flexibility

As shifting the focus to customers is one of the primary goals of this business strategy, businesses become closer to their customers. Businesses may implement a method that helps them spot their weak points to easily adapt to market requirements.

• Quality

One of the main goals of recreating your business process is to achieve the desired quality output. This does not only concern about the products or services your business produces but also your employee’s standard of work.

• Innovation

Implementing new technology will greatly help improve your customer service. It will also shorten lead times and place your business in a competitive position in the market.

How To Implement Business Process Re-engineering?

Creating a business process or recreating an existing process for your business is not an easy task. This can be extremely time-consuming, expensive, and risky for your business. The failure rate may also be high especially for first-timers. Here are some steps to help you be guided:

• Create a vision

Before taking action to redesign your business process, there should be a clear justification for such an action. Objectives should be clarified and vision should be created.

• Select a team

You need to form a skilled and talented team to minimise the chances of failure. Setting up a diversified team with different perspectives and accurate diagnosis will greatly help in developing a new business process.

• Develop new process

With solid pieces of evidence presented that your current business process should be redesigned, a new business process should be developed. The new process should be customer-oriented, and the vision focuses on improving customer satisfaction.

• Implement the new process

Once the development and planning process is fully completed, a small scale test should be run. This is to examine the new process and to evaluate if adjustments are needed. If the new process works with a small scale, it can then be carried out to a larger scale.

• Evaluate

Changes are bound to happen through time. Constant evaluation with your business process is needed to ensure effectiveness and to meet the desired results.

How To Determine If Your Business Is Ready?

There are quite a number of businesses and organisations that have already undergone major business process re-engineering efforts. If you are wondering if your business can be one of them, here are some few considerations:

• Number of employees

A minimum number of twenty employees with at least four people in managerial positions is required. For small businesses that haven’t reached such numbers yet, it is better to set your focus on growing your business first.

• Commitment to innovation

Business owners or leaders should have a strong passion for finding new ways and innovations to improve business operations. Redesigning your business process requires open-mindedness in exploring other techniques and accepting various perspectives.

• IT infrastructure

Another consideration you need to carefully deliberate is ensuring if your business has an adequate IT infrastructure. The readiness to invest in information technology should also be examined.

Why Some Business Process Re-engineering Programs Fail

As said, implementing business process re-engineering programs can be risky. There are some businesses that attempt to redesign their business process but unfortunately fail in managing so. Where did they go wrong? What do they miss?

Here are some reasons why some businesses fail in their attempts of redesigning their business process:

• Insufficient focus on the business process.

The lack of focus and willingness to examine various problems with the existing business process often leads to the failure of the new one. To avoid the same errors, you need to identify them in you existing process.

• Lack of training.

Without proper training, a new business process often fails. Sometimes, drastic implementation of the new process leads to its failure. Training of employees requires time and such changes can be overwhelming for them to deal with.

• Inadequate IT infrastructure.

Introducing BPR solutions to your business requires adequate sophisticated IT systems and supports. The process of redesigning your business process is often dependent on the level of IT systems and supports your business can afford. It does not only support your new process but it also offers a new set of opportunities for your business as a whole.

• Passive implementation.

Passive implementation of the newly designed business process is one of the many reasons why most BPR solutions fail. Instead of doing it passively, proactive implementation is imperative at this point for your business.

• Poor communication.

With the lack of clear, focused, and consistent communication, any business solutions being implemented are bound to fail. Ensuring that staff at all levels have the initiative to participate and cooperate accordingly is essential. Their actions will have an impact on the business.

It’s Your Turn!

With the secrets being unraveled to you just now, how do you plan to use that information? Do you think your business is now capable and ready to implement a new business process?