Introduction into business reengineering | The “case for action” is a description of the organisation’s business problem and current situation; it justifies the need for change. The “vision statement” describes how the organisation is going to operate and outlines the kind of results it must achieve. The top management should inform other employees about the visions |
Identification of business processes | In this step, the most important business processes are identified and are described from a global perspective using a set of process maps. Process maps give a picture of the workflows through the company. The output of this phase is a number of process maps reflecting how these high-level processes interact within the company and in relation to the outside world |
Selection of business processes | Candidates for reengineering are the most problematic processes, those with great impact on customers, processes with more chances to be successfully re-engineered or processes that contribute to the organisation’s objectives. According to an organisation’s strategic objectives, more criteria could be defined for selecting processes for redesign, such as increased customer value |
Understanding of selected business process | The reengineering team needs to gain a better understanding of the existing selected processes. The objective is the provision of a high-level view of the process under consideration, for the team members to have the intuition and insight required to create a totally new and superior design |
Redesign of the selected business processes | This is the most creative phase of the methodology because new rules and new ways of work should be invented. Imagination and inductive thinking should characterise this phase. Redesigning a process is not algorithmic or routine |
Implementation of redesigned business processes | The last phase covers the implementation phase of the BPR project. Hammer and Champy believe that the success of the implementation depends on whether the five previous phases have been properly performed |