Business process re-engineering focus on the analysis and design of workflows and processes within an organization. BPR aimed to help organizations fundamentally rethink how they do their work in order to dramatically improve customer service, cut operational costs, and become world-class competitors. BPR seeks to help companies radically restructure their organizations by focusing on the ground-up design of their business processes. According to Davenport (1990) a business process is a set of logically related tasks performed to achieve a defined business outcome. It is "a structured, measured set of activities designed to produce a specified output for a particular customer or market." Improving business processes is important for businesses to stay ahead of competition in today's marketplace. Over the last 10 to 15 years, companies have been forced to improve their business processes because customers are demanding better products and services. Many companies begin business process improvement with a continuous improvement model. The BPR methodology comprises of developing the business vision and process objectives, identifying the processes to be redesigned, understanding and measuring the existing processes, identifying IT levers and designing and building a prototype of the new process. In this context it can be mentioned that, some of the biggest obstacles faced by reengineering are lack of sustained management commitment and leadership, unrealistic scope and expectations, and resistance to change. Re-engineering emphasized a holistic focus on business objectives and how processes related to them, encouraging full-scale recreation of processes rather than iterative optimization of sub processes.
Business process re-engineering is also known as business process redesign, business transformation, or business process change management.
Definition
The most notable definition of reengineering by (Hammer and Champy, 1993) is: