BPR is vital to modern, cutting edge organizations. Over the last twenty years there has been a revolution in the way that business operation and organize themselves. Rapid technology change, increasing demands for improved customer service, and executive initiatives to improve performance have all pushed organization to streamline their process and improve operations.
Innovate’s approach to BPR focuses on improving work flow and communications between processes in order to:
- Improve customer satisfaction;
- Reduce costs;
- Improve Operations and effective service delivery; and
- Improve efficiency.
We follow an eight-step approach to BPR:
- Interview staff and stakeholders to develop detailed description of “as-is” processes and process goals;
- Identify redundant processes, inefficient operations, and unnecessary processes and functions;
- Work with senior management and staff to define future goals and define “to-be” process;
- Identify the gap between “as-is” and “to-be” processes;
- Recommend changes to “as-is” process to achieve “to-be” process and eliminate redundant processes, inefficient operations, and unnecessary processes and functions;
- Brief management and study sponsors to gain support for proposed changes;
- Develop implementation plan and schedule; and
- Work with front-line staff to implement revised processes.
We believe that the essence of successful BPR is to work closely with front-line staff. Our experience has been that formal process descriptions and organizations charts do not reveal the real state of operations. We believe that only those intimately involved with operations know what happens, what’s broken, and what works in organizations. Thus, we focus our work on lower and mid-level staff. Accordingly we begin our work with extensive interviews with staff and ask them simply “what’s wrong and how we can we improve?” We then bring our insights to senior management and present them with a simple, unvarnished picture of operations and where they need to improve. Working with staff and managers we then develop a practical and achievable “to-be” vision and develop an implementation plan of how to achieve this vision in a simple, straightforward way. Our goal is embed this process improvement in operating practices such that after we leave, our clients can continue to innovate and improve their operations.
This vision needs to be– we are aware too many BPR initiatives end up in overly complex, unworkable process. We have been there and know that “Rube Goldberg” processes that use exceedingly complex mechanism to perform simple tasks in indirect and convoluted way rarely benefit anyone. These overly complex systems normally occur when big consulting firms use young, inexperience analysts to redesign processes – they simply do not have the experience and real-world understanding to design practical processes. Thus, we use our most experienced staff to work on BPR. The results are processes that genuinely improve processes and produce real improvement in organizational operations.
