Business Process Reengineering
Business Process Reengineering
Making changes to the process gets more and more difficult as your business
grows because of habits and investments in old methods. But in reality, you
cannot improve processes without making changes. Processes have to be
reengineered carefully since experiments and mistakes bring in a lot of
confusion
While BPI is an incremental setup that focuses on tinkering with the existing
processes to improve them, BPR looks at the broader picture. BPI doesn’t go
against the grain. It identifies the process bottlenecks and recommends
changes in specific functionalities. The process framework principally remains
the same when BPI is in play. BPR, on the other hand, rejects the existing rules
and often takes an unconventional route to redo processes from a high-level
management perspective.
BPI is like upgrading the exhaust system on your project car. Business Process
Reengineering, BPR is about rethinking the entire way the exhaust is handled.
stakeholders need to get a better understanding of the key steps involved in it.
Although the process can differ from one organization to another, these steps
listed below succinctly summarize the process:
Identify all the errors and delays that hold up a free flow of the process. Make
sure if all details are available in the respective steps for the stakeholders to
make quick decisions.
Check if all the steps are absolutely necessary. If a step is there to solely inform
the person, remove the step, and add an automated email trigger.
Create a new process that solves all the problems you have identified. Don’t be
afraid to design a totally new process that is sure to work well. Designate KPIs
for every step of the process.
The story
The telecom giant reviewed the situation and concluded that it needed drastic
measures to simplify things–a one-stop solution for all customer queries. It
decided to merge the various departments into one, let go of employees to
minimize multiple handoffs and form a nerve center of customer support to
handle all issues.
A few months later, they set up a customer care center in Atlanta and started
training their repair clerks as ‘frontend technical experts’ to do the new,
comprehensive job. The company equipped the team with new software that
allowed the support team to instantly access the customer database and handle
almost all kinds of requests.
Now, if a customer called for billing query, they could also have that erratic dial
tone fixed or have a new service request confirmed without having to call
another number. While they were still on the phone, they could also make use of
the push-button phone menu to connect directly with another department to
make a query or input feedback about the call quality.