MANThLE

GlossaryUpdated 2 min read

Business process reengineering

Business process reengineering (BPR) is the radical redesign of a process around the outcome it exists to produce, starting from a blank page instead of the current steps. Michael Hammer (Harvard Business Review, 1990) and Thomas Davenport with James Short (MIT Sloan Management Review, 1990) introduced it, and Hammer and Champy's 1993 book made it widely known.

Reengineering starts from a question most automation projects skip: should this process look the way it does? The answer is usually no. Processes accumulate steps that made sense once, a check added after an incident, a copy kept because two systems never talked, an approval nobody remembers requesting. Reengineering removes them before anything is automated.

Where did business process reengineering come from?

Two articles in 1990 started it. Michael Hammer's "Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate" in the July to August Harvard Business Review argued that companies were using computers to speed up processes that should not exist. The same summer, Thomas Davenport and James Short published "The New Industrial Engineering" in MIT Sloan Management Review, arguing that information technology and process redesign belong together and describing a five-step approach drawn from nineteen companies.

Hammer and James Champy's 1993 book, Reengineering the Corporation, made the idea a management movement. IBM's current definition keeps the original intent: "the radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in performance, efficiency, and effectiveness."

How does reengineering work in practice?

The method is simple to state and hard to do:

  1. Name the outcome. A customer's service is active and billed correctly. A supplier is paid the right amount on time.
  2. Map the current process honestly, including the workarounds and the spreadsheets.
  3. Question every step. Who needs this? What would break without it? Does it exist because of a system limit that no longer applies?
  4. Design the target process with as few handoffs as the outcome allows.
  5. Choose the technology last, to fit the design.

Why did BPR lose its shine?

Reengineering programs in the 1990s were often run top down, at the scale of a whole company. IBM's overview of BPR notes that its "association with the downsizing and outsourcing trends that were unpopular at the time brought negative attention" to the method. The lesson Manthle takes from that history is to apply the thinking to one process at a time, with the people who do the work in the room.

What is BPR's lesson for AI?

Hammer's title applies again. An AI system built around today's process inherits its waste: the duplicate checks, the copy between systems, the approval that waits two days for a signature. The difference now is what the redesigned process can contain. A step that once needed a person only to read and interpret, such as reading a letter or matching a messy record, can be given to a model working within policy, while the judgment calls that need authority stay with a person.

That is why the Rethink step comes before the Engineer step in the AI implementation method Manthle uses, and why a business process automation engagement that starts by scripting the current steps has skipped the most valuable part. Process redesign is the smaller-scale form of the same discipline, and process mining supplies the honest map of the process as it runs today.

Questions

Business process reengineering means designing a process again from its purpose, removing steps that exist only because of how the work used to be done.

Michael Hammer, in Harvard Business Review (July to August 1990), and Thomas Davenport and James Short, in MIT Sloan Management Review (Summer 1990), introduced the idea; Hammer and James Champy's 1993 book, Reengineering the Corporation, made it widely known.

Process improvement adjusts the existing steps a little at a time. Reengineering questions whether the steps should exist and redesigns the process from the outcome back.

Reengineering matters more with AI. Automating an old process locks in its waste, and a model can now take on judgment steps that once needed a person.

Define the outcome and the customer, map the current process, question every step and handoff, design the target process, then choose the technology that fits it.

Sources

  1. Harvard Business Review, Michael Hammer, Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate (July 1990)
  2. MIT Sloan Management Review, Davenport and Short, The New Industrial Engineering (Summer 1990)
  3. IBM, What is business process reengineering (BPR)?
GlossaryProcess redesignProcess redesign changes the steps, handoffs and roles of a process. How it differs from reengineering and automation, and how to design for people plus models.GlossaryProcess miningProcess mining rebuilds how a process actually runs from system event logs. How it works, what it reveals about where AI fits and what it cannot tell you.ServicesBusiness process automation servicesBusiness process automation services for companies with thousands of staff: one critical process rebuilt with AI, people on the exceptions, run with your team.GuidesAI implementationAI implementation for operations leaders: see the process, rethink it, engineer the AI system, harden it for production and run it with your team, step by step.GuidesBusiness process automation after AIBusiness process automation now covers whole processes, reading steps included, with people on the exceptions. What changed, what to automate first and how.