Business Process Reengineering: How to Reinvent the Wheel to Provide Strategic Advantage

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is the latest in a long line of innovative approaches concerned with improving the productivity and customer orientation of business organisations. There is emerging evidence that it has produced dramatic successes for some companies and dismal failures for others. Business process reengineering offers an alternate perspective to other business tools, for formulating strategy and providing efficiency. It is an approach based on operating processes rather than products and markets. Simplistically it provides a mechanism for creating strengths in operating processes, which may be exploited in a number of ways to provide strategic competitive advantage in a global market place. Currently there is an air of confusion about the approach, generally caused by the plethora of terms, definitions, methods and case study examples that abound in technical and professional publications, and the various factions that have climbed on board this particular profitable bandwagon. A confusion with Total Quality Management and the place both hold in redefining organisational processes add to this growing tide of confusion. Despite its successes, or perhaps because it is something new, business process reengineering has been on the receiving end of much criticism internationally. Much of this criticism rests on the misconception of what reengineering really is. The rest reflects a limited assessment of the advantages it can produce for organisations. This paper provides a definition that argues BPR is unique as a business change approach. BPR focuses upon quick action in comparison to the conventional approaches of continuous improvement. It identifies BPR as a clean fresh approach to redefining how an organisation goes about its business.