Business Process Reengineering

Definition: The Business Process Reengineering or BPR is the analysis and redesign of core business processes to achieve the substantial improvements in its performance, productivity, and quality. The business process refers to the set of interlinked tasks or activities performed to achieve a specified outcome.

Simply, the business process reengineering means to change the way an individual performs the work such that better results are accomplished. The purpose of business process reengineering is to redesign the workflows in order to dramatically improve the customer service, achieve higher levels of efficiency, cut operational costs and become a world-class competitor.

The business process reengineering involves a series of steps. These are:

Step 1: Define Objectives and Framework

Step 2: Identify Customer Needs

Step 3: Study the existing business process

Step 4: Formulate a redesign business plan

Step 5: Implement the Redesign Plan


The business process is required to be reengineered because of the following reasons:

• The processes the company is using might have become outdated or holds no relevance in the current market scenario.
• Often, the sub-divisions in the organization aims at improving their respective division performance and overlook the resultant effects on the other departments. This might lead to the underperformance of the firm as a whole.
• Due to the departmentalization, each employee focuses on the performance of his respective department and may overlook the critical issues emerging in other areas of the firm, and therefore, the need for re-engineering arises so that the role of the employees could be broadened and shall be made more responsible towards the firm.
• The existing business process could be lengthy, time-consuming, costly, obsolete, therefore, is required to be redesigned to match it with the current business requirements.
• The technology keeps on updating and in order to catch up with it, reengineering is a must.

Thus, the business process reengineering focuses on obtaining the quantum gains in terms of cost, time, output, quality and responsiveness towards customers. Also, it emphasizes on simplifying and streamlining the business process by eliminating the unnecessary or time-consuming business activities and speeding up the workflow by making the use of high-tech systems.