Beyond Incremental Improvement
When should you automate existing processes versus reimagining them entirely? Incremental improvement yields incremental gains. Business process reengineering (BPR) starts from a blank slate, questioning assumptions, and designing processes optimized for the digital age. Combined with automation, BPR creates transformative rather than incremental improvement.
When to Reengineer
Reengineering makes sense when current processes cannot achieve required performance levels, when radical change is needed to meet competitive threats, or when new capabilities enable fundamentally different approaches. Reengineering is disruptive—choose opportunities carefully.
Organizations that reengineer before automating achieve 3-4x greater improvements than those that automate as-is processes.
The Reengineering Process
Understand Current State: Document existing processes thoroughly. Use process mining to understand actual rather than assumed flows. Identify pain points, bottlenecks, and sources of variation and error.
Question Assumptions: Challenge every aspect of current process. Why does this step exist? Could it be eliminated? Combined with another step? Performed differently? By someone else?
Design Future State: Design the ideal process from scratch, not constrained by current implementation. Use automation capabilities as design inputs. Apply process design principles: minimize handoffs, parallelize where possible, build in quality.
Automation-Enabled Process Design
Automation capabilities should inform process design. What becomes possible with automation that wasn't before? Intelligent document processing enables eliminating manual data entry. AI enables decisions that previously required humans. Integration connects processes that were previously siloed.
Design processes that leverage automation strengths while accounting for limitations. Automation handles routine cases; exception handling addresses unusual situations.
Implementation Considerations
Reengineering requires change management beyond typical automation projects. Stakeholders may resist fundamental process changes. Training requirements may be greater. Implementation risk is higher than incremental approaches.
Balancing Risk and Reward
Start reengineering efforts with limited scope to prove approaches before broad deployment. Pilot with willing participants who can champion the new approach. Plan for iterations as implementation reveals improvement opportunities.