Business Re-engineering

Business reengineering has very quickly become a hot issue to American businesses. Consulting firms now include the term in their glossy marketing brochures and make certain it's liberally sprinkled throughout important client proposals. The business press describes reengineering successes with increasing frequency and these articles get our attention because the improvements realized are often of tremendous magnitude. A manager struggling to achieve improvements of 10-15% can't help but be curious about how other companies are achieving 85-90% improvement in key business areas.

Our objective is to develop an understanding of business reengineering and review ten key principles that enable successful business reengineering. We will touch upon which companies should consider business reengineering, who within these companies should champion it, what should be avoided, and how to get started.

Following this presentation of business reengineering principles we will conduct an initial reengmeering session with a representative from Acme Manufacturing Company (fictional). A prepared handout available atjhe door describes this business, their environment and their majb< challenges. The audience will be encouraged to participate as theMiicilitator leads this exercise and Acme Manufacturing Company Bfegins the exciting process of reengineerin|.

This thing we call Business Reengineering once seemed to me to be self-explanatory. It is often confused, however, with other business improvement methodologies and philosophies that have enjoyed popularity during the past few years. As a consequence, some proponents have coined new names that better differentiate Business Reengineering from other approaches.

Coopers & Lybrand, for example, has formalized an activity they call Breakpoint Business Process Redesign, focusing upon reengineering activities that create major improvements in competitive advantage. Michael Hammer, author of the recent best-seller Reengineering the Corporation, defines Business Reengineering as "the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service and speed."

I think Business Reengineering can best be viewed as a genre of business improvement methodologies. The following definition recognizes that competitive advantage stems from adding net value, as perceived by the customer, to business processes and that improvement for the sake of improvement is not the objective:

Business Reengineering is the redesign of fundamental business processes to achieve dramatic improvement in the customer measure of net value added to these processes.

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