Business process redesign (Hammer and Champy)

Business process redesign (BPR), also called business process reengineering, asks an organisation to reconstruct important end-to-end processes from first principles. The approach became a defining management movement of the 1990s because it promised dramatic gains in cost, quality, service and speed rather than another round of marginal improvement.

When to use it

• Use BPR when benchmarking reveals a serious disadvantage in cost, quality, service or speed and incremental process improvement is unlikely to close it.
• It is most appropriate for strategically important processes burdened by fragmented ownership, serial hand-offs, duplication, delay or rules designed for conditions that no longer exist.
• Because radical redesign affects jobs, authority and systems, apply it only when the potential gain justifies the disruption and leadership is prepared to implement the result.

Origins

Business process redesign emerged around nineteen ninety through parallel work by Michael Hammer and by Thomas Davenport and James Short. Hammer’s Harvard Business Review article “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate” argued that organisations should challenge obsolete processes instead of using technology merely to accelerate them. Davenport and Short similarly connected information technology with end-to-end process design. Hammer and James Champy’s 1993 book Reengineering the Corporation then popularised radical cross-functional redesign as a route to major gains in cost, quality, service and speed.

What it is

BPR offered an alternative to the conventional response to the 1989–92 recession: repeatedly cutting people and organisational units while leaving the work itself largely unchanged. Hammer and Champy proposed reinventing the processes through which a product or service is created, seeking lower unit cost and better service at the same time.

Their provocation was directed especially at the misuse of information technology. Automating every inherited task could make a poor process run faster without making it valuable—a practice they compared to paving over cowpaths. The better question was whether each activity, control and hand-off should exist at all.

A process is therefore reconsidered from a zero base. Its purpose must be justified, its contribution to customer value made explicit and its design reconstructed around the desired outcome. Activities that add no necessary value are removed rather than polished.