Business Process Management 101

About Business Process Reengineering (BPR)

Unlike business process improvement (BPI), which is about making small incremental changes to an existing process, business process re-engineering (BPR) is about making major changes to an existing process or creating a new business process in place of the old. Obviously, reengineering a can be major undertaking and should be done infrequently. Once BPR has taken place, it is often followed by a a continuous business process improvement program.

Information technology should not be the main focus for business process reengineering projects. Instead, IT should be used to implement new business processes that are created as a result of BPR efforts. Rather, of more importance is the ability to benchmark existing processes and to use these benchmarks to design the new processes and to measure progress towards the new process objectives.

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