Some time back, you must’ve heard a lot about BPR (business-process reengineering). About how your business would die if you didn’t reengineer your business processes. You must’ve had BPR consultants call on you, making presentations.

Well, they do not talk about in such dire terms anymore, but it continues to be no less critical an ingredient for business success in these days of shrinking margins. So, it is worthwhile to know what is BPR.

Automated workflows are an important ingredient for success. But automating your work as-is also means automating the inefficiencies in the current system. BPR helps avoid that by redesigning your workflows to optimize efforts and output. Before you go about optimizing your workflow, it’d be a good idea to ‘reengineer’ its critical portions.

The theory is simple, while actual implementation requires an elaborate understanding of the business environment and the rules that you operate under. To begin with, you list and map all the workflows in your business. It could range from purchase of stationery to budgeting and new product development. Theoretically, all of these can be optimized. But obviously, you’d choose to optimize those that have a more telling impact on your business.

So, after identifying the workflows, the second step is to identify those that are the most critical for your business. At the same time, you could also identify critical processes that are not performing as well as they should. It’s worthwhile to note that processes that were critical last year may no longer be so this year. Circumstances might have changed considerably since then. BPR is not a one-time effort, but a continuing one.

Before you go to the next step, let’s take a look at the types of optimization possible. Workflow Strategies by James G Kobielus (Comdex Publishing, 1997) identifies six areas in which any given workflow can be optimized. These are speed, cost, accuracy (can be a subset of quality), quality, customer satisfaction and flexibility. Obviously, optimizing for one (say speed) could lead to inefficiencies in another (cost) and vice versa.

Now, we come to the third step: decide what criteria the identified process should be optimized for. After this, process optimization is an expert’s job (with common sense along with process experience).

Finally, decisions on which processes to optimize should be driven by business imperatives and not by technology.

Krishna Kumar