I came across the term Business Process Reengineering (BPR) a few months back and found it fascinating. This blog post recaps key takeaways from a BPR class conducted by NUS-ISS, while giving readers a very brief overview of BPR.
What is BPR?
BPR is a huge endeavour that involves redesigning and improving business processes within an organisation with the goal of achieving significant improvements in efficiency, effectiveness, and overall performance by rethinking and restructuring how work is done. BPR is not Kaizen, which looks at small but regular improvements. Instead, the payoffs to a BPR have to be big and immediate.
Why does BPR matter?
If done right, benefits of BPR include:
Increased Efficiency: eliminate redundant steps, streamline workflows, and reduce unnecessary delays, leading to improved process efficiency.
Cost Reduction: remove inefficiencies and waste, leading to significant reduction in operational costs.
Improved Quality: reengineered processes to better address customer needs, leading to higher-quality products and services.
Enhanced Agility: respond more quickly to changing market conditions and ever increasing customer (be it patients or undergraduate students) demands.
Competitive Advantage: provides organisations with a competitive edge leading to outperforming their rivals in terms of speed, cost, and customer satisfaction.
With benefits like these, why isn’t everyone doing BPR? It's because the success rate of BPR projects is abysmally low. 7 in 10 BPR projects fail, so it's important to learn how others overcome the challenges and pitfalls.
Who benefits from a BPR?
Everyone! Whether you realise it or not, we are all beneficiaries of BPR done by other people.
Our instructor, Mr YU Chen Kuang pieced together several local examples of how BPR has vastly improved the processes of services that Singaporeans take for granted. For example, the parking app has replaced our physical carpark coupons, movie tickets / air tickets can now be purchased online and reflected in real time, etc. Even Bank housing loans (that used to take a week) can now be done in under an hour!
Curious, I went online to search for Michael Hammer’s classic book and downloaded the eBook into my smartphone’s libby app in under 20 seconds! This got me thinking about how I took it for granted that library books that once relied on physical library cards, can now be borrowed directly from our mobile phones. In fact, library users can borrow up to 32 books at one go. A far cry from just 4 books in the past. Gone too are the days where books could only be loaned during office hours. And all it took was someone asking the questions:
“Why was it done?” followed by “Why was it done this way?”
Such a simple yet powerful approach of asking fundamental questions. It almost hurts to think why aren’t we all questioning more things this way.
How do we do a BPR?
Using a framework, we move through the BPR process one stage at a time. Through this common framework, all the team members who have been trained can also see the big picture as well as better understand how their individual role contributes to the success of the BPR.
Here are some key considerations at each stage of the BPR framework.
Project Initiation
Identify key stakeholders
Who is your sponsor? No sponsor, please don’t start!
Who is in your Steering Committee? They will help you clear obstacles and also publicise the project within the organisation
Who is your external consultant? Do you have a knowledgeable BPR expert to run the project?
Clarify the goal: Is it cost, quality, service or speed? It's a zero sum game, you cannot have everything. Prioritise which area to focus on.
Utilise Kick-off (KO) meeting to align the objectives, narrow down the scope, identify deliverables, deadlines and immediate next steps
Current Process Analysis
Identify the processes that a) have the deepest trouble, b) potential to generate greatest impact & c) highest chance of success to undergo a BPR
Identify how best to do information gathering (e.g. interviews, surveys, doc analysis, observation, etc.)
Familarise with Business Process mapping (e.g. swim lanes, SIPOC, value stream mapping, etc.)
Identify opportunities for improvements using the “Business Process Analysis Framework”.
Level 1 map - Identify all the different actors and hand-offs (Yo-yos)
Level 2 map - Identify the value-added vs non-value added steps; identify bottlenecks, identify control points
Identify things that were done in sequential fashion that now can be done in parallel
Identify exceptions to the rule; there will always be “special” cases
Look through IT systems
New Process Design
Challenge the assumptions
Ask fundamental questions (5W1H)
Remove non-value added processes, then apply IT.
Apply the 80-20 rule
Process Implementation
Adopting a Phased approach vs full implementation
Set targets (deadlines, deliverables)
Align responsibilities (who does what and when)
Identify Process Owners and get them involved (one process, one owner)
Where can I learn more about it?
If you are convinced of the merits of learning BPR, the next logical step would be to look for companies who offer BPR training. I can only speak for the one that I attended, which was conducted by NUS ISS (free for NUS staff). You will learn a brief history of how BPR came to be, why BPR is so powerful and how all of us can do it with the right tools and training.
The workshop spans 3 full days, and covers from theory, to a simulated practice where participants can have a hands-on practice relooking at their own processes but under the scrutiny of other course mates and an experienced instructor (Choose Mr YU if you have a choice!).
This is one of those workshops worth doing in-person. Extremely insightful and engaging, I highly recommend it!
Benedict Chia
29 July 2022
References
[1] Hammer, M. (1990, July 1). Reengineering work: Don’t automate, obliterate. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/1990/07/reengineering-work-dont-automate-obliterate
[2] Ho, O. (2019, March 4). Parliament: Library users can borrow up to 32 books each time from April 1. The Straits Times. https://www.straitstimes.com/politics/parliament-people-can-borrow-up-to-32-books-each-time-from-april-1
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