Some people consider business process reengineering (BPR) a nice way of saying "downsizing." In fact, BPR is the analysis and redesign of workflow within and between enterprises, which may or may not point to downsizing.

The idea is simple; sometimes radical redesign and reorganization of an enterprise (wiping the slate clean) is necessary to lower costs and increase quality of service. And consistently, information technology is the key enabler for such radical change.
 
And while BPR had its corporate boom in the early 1990's, many of the profits that businesses enjoy today are a direct result of reengineering undertaken in the past five years. Workflow designs have a much shorter shelf life today. The assumptions about technology, people, and organizational goals that motivate designs are more dynamic, making periodic assessment more critical than ever.

More specifically, the seven principles of reengineering to streamline the work process and thereby achieve significant levels of improvement in quality, time management, and cost are:

1. Organize around outcomes, not tasks;
    
   
2. Identify all the processes in an organization and prioritize them in order of redesign urgency;
    
   
3. Integrate information processing work into the real work that produces the information;
    
   
4. Treat geographically dispersed resources as though they were centralized;
    
   
5. Link parallel activities in the workflow instead of just integrating their results;
    
   
6. Put the decision point where the work is performed, and build control into the process, and;
    
   
7. Capture information once (at the source).

BPR failures can almost exclusively be attributed to a lack of sustained management commitment, unrealistic scope and expectations, and/or a resistance to change that often prompts management to abandon the concept of BPR. (Many large corporations that were unable to realize the benefits of BPR ended up embracing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) methodology.)

Small and medium-sized business (SMBs) have always had a tactical advantage in implementing BPR, since they do not have as many business and political units to syncronize. Large corporations are cumbersome to manipulate, but small businesses in particular can implement changes almost immediately.

Similarly, large BPR consultancies have an overhead that, for all practical purposes, prevents them  from assisting small businesses. Our consultancy specializes in BPR for SMBs and we invite you to consider us when you're ready for a fresh look at your business.