How To Boost Efficiency With Business Process Reengineering

The world changes fast, and organizations must evolve to succeed. That means looking inward to identify areas for improvement and working to optimize processes for maximum efficiency.

In some cases, an incremental approach, such as a business process redesign, will be enough to realign your goals and keep pace.

However, you may find a more radical overhaul is necessary to generate the competitive advantage your organization is after.  

Business process reengineering (BPR) enables businesses to rework processes and ways of working to create new pathways to success. But these changes can often be drastic—which is why it’s crucial your organization works to address the people side of that change every step of the way.

Read on to find out how business process reengineering works, where it differs from business process redesign, and the steps you can take to optimize your BPR using change management.

What Is Business Process Reengineering?

Business process reengineering (BPR) is a management strategy that completely overhauls one or more core business processes to improve critical performance metrics like cost, quality, service and speed.

Organizations are adopting BPR practices for many reasons, including:

• Improving performance to match increasing competition
• Growing complexity of current processes
• Delivering value to customers via personalized services
• Implementing digital transformation caused by technological advancements, like AI and cloud-based solutions
• Reducing costs
• Enhancing resource usage

BPR isn't new. It has been a necessity for successful organizations for decades. For example, Ford Motor Company reengineered its accounts payable process in the 1990s. It installed a new process that streamlined accounting operations and increased accuracy in the workplace.

Adopting BPR involves analyzing key processes that affect company performance, redesigning them to improve quality and efficiency, and implementing new processes.

The success of BPR projects heavily depends on strong leadership and clear communication. Senior management and primary sponsors must understand the technical and behavioral aspects of the change. This helps them give credibility to the new system and adequately fulfill their roles.

Because BPR fundamentally alters how organizations operate—impacting processes, job roles, workflows and structure—change management is vital for implementation.

The Benefits of Business Process Reengineering

Business process reengineering centers on optimization. Its overarching goal is to overhaul existing processes so they become more efficient—and in doing so, organizations that use BPR can expect a range of benefits.

Here are nine key benefits of business process reengineering:

• Cost reduction – Streamlining core business processes eliminates unnecessary steps, reduces redundancy, and optimizes resource utilization. These factors help companies significantly lower their operational costs.
• Technology optimization – BPR often involves integrating new technologies to improve processes. This digital transformation enhances investments in technology, so organizations use solutions that improve processes and better serve the business strategy.
• Increased efficiency – By simplifying workflows and removing bottlenecks, processes become faster and more responsive. This leads to shorter production cycle times and increased output, allowing organizations to serve customers quickly and effectively.
• Reduced errors – BPR helps identify and remove errors and inconsistencies. This results in the production of higher-quality goods and services, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Flexibility and scalability – BPR creates flexible business processes that quickly adapt to meet market demands or incorporate new technologies. This is vital in the modern business environment.
• Boost customer satisfaction – By redesigning processes from a customer-centric viewpoint, BPR can ensure that the output meets or exceeds customer expectations. Improved quality and faster service contribute to higher customer satisfaction levels. T-Mobile's implementation of the Team of Experts (TEX) Model for customer service is an excellent example of this benefit.
• Gain a competitive advantage – Better product quality, reduced costs, and improved customer service can give organizations a competitive edge. This advantage is crucial in fiercely competitive industries, where continuous improvement is necessary.
• Greater employee satisfaction – Business process improvement can improve employee satisfaction by eliminating tedious, manual tasks that aren't adding value. This frees employees to focus on more important and rewarding aspects of their jobs, leading to improved morale and productivity.
• Improved decision-making – A radical redesign often reveals valuable data and insights to improve decision-making. Companies can make informed decisions to achieve strategic objectives by reengineering processes and analyzing relevant data.

What Are the Challenges of Business Process Reengineering?

Business process reengineering empowers organizations to achieve more with less. However, many organizations face challenges when implementing a new BPR project. For example:

• Resistance to change – When you take a radical approach toward rebuilding ingrained processes, it’s natural for some of the people impacted by the change to resist it. The primary culprit is a lack of awareness about the reasons for the change. That’s why early engagement—a fundamental component of the Prosci Methodology—is so important.
• Culture misalignment – Organizations entrenched in traditional ways or old processes can often hinder a business process reengineering initiative. To overcome this challenge, change practitioners perform cultural assessments and provide training to align the organizational culture with new ways of working.
• Inadequate change management capability – Effective business process reengineering (BPR) requires a structured change management approach to guide the transition. Without this capability, organizations may struggle to maintain focus on project objectives and effectively address resistance. The Prosci Change Management Maturity Model can help organizations assess their current change management capabilities, identify gaps, and develop a plan to enhance their approach, ensuring that change management becomes an integral part of their operations.

While these challenges can be significant, they can be overcome by focusing on the people side of your process redesign, not just the technical aspects.

With that in mind, it's important to understand how business process reengineering differs from other improvement methodologies—particularly business process management (BPM) and business process redesign.

Business Process Reengineering vs. Business Process Management

Business process reengineering (BPR) is often confused with business process management (BPM). Both methodologies improve operational efficiency, but they differ in scope, approach and purpose.

Here's a comparison of the two methods across four critical areas so your organization can choose the right one.

Business Process Reengineering vs. Business Process Management

Business process reengineering

Business process reengineering (BPR) completely transforms organizational processes for dramatic improvement over a short period.

• Approach and focus – BPR is project based. It involves radical, large-scale changes, and reimagining entire processes for improvements in performance metrics rather than making incremental changes to existing methods.
• Implementation – BPR initiatives require strong leadership, a clear vision, and substantial resources to support significant changes to current operations, structure and culture.
• Approach to technology – In BPR, technology plays a vital, transformative role, enabling new working methods.
• Risk – BPR projects are higher in risk due to the scale of change but potentially higher rewards.

Business process management

Business process management (BPM) is a continuous discipline that evaluates, improves and governs business functions across the organization.

• Approach and focus – BPM is an ongoing, iterative practice that seeks continuous improvement. It focuses on analyzing, modeling, automating, monitoring and optimizing existing processes over time.
• Implementation – In BPM, systems and tools are put in place to manage and monitor workflows continuously. Performance data and stakeholder feedback guide improvement.
• Approach to technology – Technology is used to support and enhance existing processes rather than completely transform them.
• Risk – BPM initiatives involve lower risk than reengineering, as changes are implemented gradually and continuously.

BPM acts as the long-term framework through which business process redesign and reengineering efforts may be governed. Organizations that want sustainable, data-driven process improvement tend to use BPM to support and monitor these changes.

Business Process Reengineering vs. Business Process Redesign

Organizations often use the terms “business process reengineering” and “business process redesign” interchangeably. That’s understandable because the approaches share similar goals.

However, a few key differences distinguish BRP from business process redesign.

What is Business Process Redesign?

Business process redesign is the systematic analysis and restructuring of existing business processes. Like business process reengineering, business process redesign aims to improve your organization’s operational efficiency, effectiveness and adaptability.

Business process redesign achieves these goals through:

• Process optimization – Business process redesign enables organizations to better identify bottlenecks and points of friction within existing workflows or processes. That makes it easier to refine and restructure those processes to improve performance.
• Incremental improvement – Business process redesign uses an incremental approach to optimize workflows step-by-step. This continuous improvement process refines processes over time.
• Cost reduction – Business process redesign is about optimizing processes and simplifying workflows. This is achieved by reducing waste—helping you cut operational expenses without reducing the quality of your outputs.

For example, let’s say your organization wants to reduce customer waiting times. 

Using a business process redesign approach, you might identify that the greatest bottleneck appears at the triage stage, in which your customer service team chats with customers to identify the issue and redirect them to the correct team.

As a result, you could integrate an AI chatbot to triage inquiries by asking questions to categorize help desk tickets. Your customer service staff then continues to manage and respond to chats where required.

The result is that waiting times for your customers are reduced by redesigning a process without a total overhaul of your customer service operations. The key word in this case is “overhaul” because that’s what sets business process redesign apart from business process reengineering.

While BPM and business process redesign may appear similar, they differ in purpose and scope. BPM is a broader management discipline focused on continuously improving all processes across an organization through governance, automation and performance tracking. 

Business process redesign, on the other hand, is a specific method used to revise and optimize individual processes—typically as part of a BPM initiative. In short, BPM is the system for managing improvements, and redesign is one of the tools within that system.

What’s the difference between Business Process Reengineering and Business Process Redesign?

Where a business process redesign looks at process change incrementally, business process reengineering seeks to achieve something more radical. 

The key differences between these two approaches are:

• Project scope – This is the primary difference between the two approaches. As we’ve already touched upon, business process reengineering is meant to be big and transformative. By contrast, business process redesign is more incremental and emphasizes ‌updating or tweaking existing processes to produce better outcomes.
• Project focus – Because the scope of a project directly reflects its focus, this is another core difference in approach. Business process redesign focuses on continuous improvement to refine processes and make the most of what already exists. Business process reengineering focuses on identifying issues and addressing those issues by rebuilding processes from the ground up.
• Risk level – Business process redesign uses an incremental approach. The changes you’re implementing are going to be less radical. As a result, a redesign approach can be more flexible than reengineering because it’s easier to pivot.

Regardless of these core differences, both approaches are valid and can produce sustainable change within your organization. 

The Steps of Business Process Reengineering

The scope and focus of your organization’s optimization project may vary depending on your chosen approach. Both business process reengineering and business process redesign follow a similar general process.

1. Create your team – A BPR team is created in the initiation stage. This team defines clear objectives and a framework that aligns with the overall business strategy. Then, the team secures executive support to back the project and provide resources.
2. Understand current processes – The BPR team identifies processes critical to performance, customer satisfaction, and business outcomes. They document and analyze the current workflow—including inputs, tasks, outputs and interactions—to identify redundancies and unnecessary steps that cause delays or frustrate customers.
3. Design new process models – The BPR team rethinks how to complete the work without worrying about current limitations. They question ‌basic assumptions about how the entire process works. After ideation, they create new process designs that are streamlined and customer-focused, and utilize technology.
4. Build a business case – BPR teams evaluate the costs of redesigning the processes against the expected benefits, including cost reductions and efficiency gains, to build a business case. They also perform risk assessments to identify challenges and develop strategies to mitigate them.
5. Implement the new processes – The team outlines a detailed plan to implement the new processes, including timelines, required resources, roles and responsibilities. They also develop a change management strategy to manage the transition.
6. Evaluate results and iterate – After implementing this process, the team evaluates the BPR’s results against the predefined objectives, analyzing operational efficiency, cost savings, and customer satisfaction levels. Based on this evaluation, they identify any improvements and iterate on the process redesign.

Together, these steps offer a structured path from process analysis to execution and continuous improvement. But, even the best-designed processes can fall short without the right support—this is where a strong change management strategy becomes essential to ensure successful adoption and long-term results.

How Change Management Streamlines Business Process Reengineering

Change management is integral to BPR because it addresses the aspects of human and organizational transformation. It ensures that the technical and operational changes meet with corresponding transformations in the organizational culture, mindset and behaviors.

Change management also plays an important role in business process redesign projects. Although BPR focuses on creating more radical change, change management principles can equally support the more incremental approach of business process redesign.

Here’s how:

1. Facilitating understanding and commitment

Change management enables support and commitment from leadership and employees at all levels. It helps communicate the vision, goals and benefits of the BPR initiative, helping everyone understand why change is necessary and what it entails.

Active, visible, and supportive sponsors of change:

• Lead and motivate others in the organization
• Make effective decisions
• Communicate directly with stakeholders for the project management and change management teams
• Influence employees and other leaders

Prosci research has shown that projects with extremely effective sponsors were 79% likely to meet their objectives, compared to just 27% with extremely ineffective sponsors.

Correlation of Sponsor Effectiveness With Meeting Objectives

2. Preparing the organization for change

Change management involves preparing the organization for upcoming changes by assessing readiness and addressing potential resistance before it becomes problematic.

For instance, you can use the Prosci 3-Phase Process to deploy a change strategy that is customized, detailed and scalable. The process has three key phases:

• In Phase 1 – Prepare Approach, change management and project management teams collaborate to develop a change strategy. They define what they are trying to achieve, how it impacts individuals, and what steps they need to take to achieve desired outcomes.
• In Phase 2 – Manage Change, they decide how to prepare and equip people during the BPR change, track performance, and adjust their strategy to increase adoption.

Prosci 3-Phase Process

• In Phase 3 – Sustain Outcomes, teams establish a plan to ensure change is adopted in all parts of the organization and is sustained for the long term. They review performance and focus on implementing actions to sustain change outcomes.

By creating a detailed strategy using change frameworks, BPR teams can prepare effectively and engage key stakeholders and champions who can advocate for the change.

3. Developing competencies and skills

BPR often introduces new technologies and processes that require new skills. Change management supports the change process for BPR by delivering knowledge on what to do during the transition and how to perform in the new system.

For example, in the Prosci ADKAR® Model, the major focus is on bridging the gap between knowledge and ability through training, education, practice and coaching.

Prosci ADKAR Model

Once employees understand the new skills required, BPR teams can organize training and development programs, provide access to tools, and implement feedback. These steps ensure employees are well-equipped to handle their new roles and responsibilities, increasing the likelihood of success.

4. Managing the transition

Change management provides a structured approach for dismantling current business processes and introducing new ones during BPR initiatives. While project management encompasses the technical side of this transition, change management covers the people side.

Applying an approach like the Prosci Methodology allows BPR teams to support people through change. They can create a strategy to execute the transition in phases, minimize disruptions to ongoing operations, and ensure continuity of service.

By effectively managing the human side of change, organizations can enhance the adoption and sustainment of BPR initiatives.

5. Minimizing resistance

Resistance to change is natural during BPR projects as employees and other people impacted by the change worry about disruptions, job security, and the company's new direction. Our research has identified that mid-level managers are the most resistant to change.

Most Resistant Groups

Change management strategies can minimize resistance behaviors through prevention, involving employees in the change process, providing clear and consistent communication, and offering support throughout a change. By addressing concerns and collecting feedback, BPR teams can remove barriers to adopting the reengineered processes and build a positive perception of the change.

6. Enhancing communication

Effective communication ensures all employees know why the change is happening and how it will impact their everyday work and the organization. Building Awareness in this way ensures all employees and stakeholders understand their role in the transition and are informed about developments that affect them, including the progress of the BPR initiative.

Continued over time, clear communication and transparency help to build trust and maintain morale during major BPR changes.

7. Supporting the cultural shift

BPR projects can require a change in organizational culture to support new working methods. Change management supports this cultural transformation by identifying desired behaviors and values and embedding them through leadership actions, communication and reinforcement mechanisms.

After implementation, change strategies also help embed the changes into the organization's fabric to ensure sustainability. This includes establishing metrics and feedback loops to monitor the effectiveness of the new processes and making adjustments to maintain alignment with organizational goals.

8. Aligning organizational structure and roles

With BPR, organizational structures and roles may need realigning to support new processes. Change management aids in this realignment, ensuring that the organizational structure supports the optimized processes. It also helps clearly define and communicate new roles and responsibilities.

Strategies to Supercharge Your Business Process Redesign and Reengineering

Change may be a daunting prospect for people within your organization—particularly if the processes that you’re trying to reengineer or redesign are well-established and deeply ingrained. Don’t be deterred.

Just make sure you place equal consideration on the people side of change, and follow these strategies:

1. Integrate change management early – Create a structured change management plan from the project's outset. Ensure that your plan clearly aligns with your business process reengineering or business process redesign objectives. Critically, engage with impacted people in your organization early to gather input on your change management plan and encourage a commitment to work with those changes. This will go a long way toward preventing resistance to change as your project moves forward.
   

   Prosci Unified Value Proposition

   

2. Establish a clear communications plan – Develop a comprehensive communications plan that clearly articulates the key components of your initiative. Use multiple channels to reach all the people impacted by the change, and tailor your messages to address specific concerns they may have. Your communications need to highlight positive outcomes to demonstrate how optimized processes will improve conditions for each impacted person.

3. Benchmark your performance – You can’t demonstrate your BPR project’s success without benchmarks. Identify KPIs that align with your business process redesign or business process reengineering goals, and then regularly review performance data to ensure continuous improvement.

Change doesn’t happen overnight. Yet, by using a structured change management approach you’re setting your organization up for a smoother transition, better adoption and more sustainable outcomes.

Prosci Supports Business Process Reengineering Efforts

Whether you’re incrementally evolving your business processes or rebuilding workflows from the ground up, change will be a part of it. It’s the only way your organization can thrive and gain a competitive edge.

Yet while business process redesign and business process reengineering focus on addressing the technical side of change, they fall short when it comes to factoring in the people side of change. That’s why you need to integrate change management into your BPR initiatives.

Prosci empowers leaders and teams to succeed at change. With our proven change management methodology, tried-and-tested processes, models and tools, Prosci can help guide your organization to establish a culture of continuous improvement.