What is meant by Business Process Reengineering?

Business process reengineering or BPR is a very important concept when it comes to achieving the business goals centred on the development of a software product. This article is all about the same concept. Let us define the business process re-engineering process formally.

"The process that involves analyzing and designing of the processes and workflows within the organization which is developing a particular software product is called business process re-engineering". 

Business process re- engineering has got many other names like:

1. Business process redesigning
2. Business transformation
3. Business process change management

What is a business process?

- A business process can be thought of as an aggregation of tasks that are logically related to each other and are meant to achieve a pre-defined business outcome. 

- Re-engineering eventually led to many changes in the management processes for the good. - The best example that can be given is of the cross functional team! 

- The concept of cross functionality came in to existences because of the need for re- engineering of the functional tasks which are separately developed in to the processes that are completely cross functional. 

- The concept of business process re engineering is gaining popularity worldwide since there are so many management information systems developments which aim at achieving a wide integration of a large number of business functions.

- Few of those management information systems are:

1. Supply chain management
2. Enterprise resource planning
3. Knowledge management systems
4. Human resource management systems
5. Groupware systems
6. Collaborative systems
7. Customer relationship management and so on.

- This technique emerged in the private sector to help the organizations fundamentally, so that they can improve up on their customer service to a large extent. 

- This technique also helped in reducing the development cost and gain the world class competitive edge.

Key Aspects of Re-engineering Process

The following are the two very important key aspects of the re- engineering process:

1. Deployment of the sophisticated information systems and
2. Continual development.

Details about Business Process Re-engineering

- The leading organizations of the world which are known to support the innovative business processes are used to deploy this technique instead of refining the current methodologies of doing work. 

- Business process re-engineering involves rethinking and then radically redesigning the already existing processes and resources of the organization.

- The business process re- engineering cannot be called as a mere business improvisation technique rather it is a technique using which the whole way in which the work is done can be redesigned for the better. 

- A high level assessment of the mission of the organization, its customer needs and strategic goals marks the beginning of the business process re-engineering. 

- The business process redesigning invokes the question, “does the (aspect) needs to be redefined?” 

- During the implementation of the business process re- engineering technique, an organization may feel that till now it has been working up on the assumptions that are questionable. 

- On implementing this technique, they are forced to think what exactly they should be doing. - The primary focus of the business process re- engineering is on the business processes of the organizations that govern the usage of the resources to develop software products and services to cater the needs of the customers. 

- Business process re- engineering works on the philosophy that “a business process can be broken down in to several short and simple processes which then can be individually measured, modeled, and improved up on”.   

- Apart from this, all the processes can also redesigned altogether.

- With business process re- engineering, the whole business process is optimized in such a way that the organization and the customers reap only benefits.