Business Process Redesign
The increasing need to manage competitive pressures demands that organisations be both more flexible and more adaptive. Business Process Reengineering (BPR) considers these issues with a comprehensive view of process transformation. Effective BPR incorporates more elusive factors including social issues, business strategy, people performance and enabling technologies. To facilitate an increase in the quality of process change projects, organisations today must look at business process reengineering as a holistic approach to change.
Business Process Redesign is used to achieve several improvements simultaneously:
- increase sales effectiveness
- reduce business operating costs
- improve customer service
- improve quality
- exploit new technologies
- cope with mergers and restructures
- become ‘appropriately' compliant to new regulations
Processes are everything that organisations actually do, therefore process performance drives organisational performance. Focusing only on process flows, we can undertake a broader assessment of the current state and a more wide ranging search for root causes and effective solutions. This includes all the inter-related elements in the ‘operational architecture': processes / people / products / technology / organisation. The use of powerful process modelling tools to document, analyse and simulate processes allows complexity to be managed and visualised.
Clarifying and addressing customers' requirements brings a clear focus on those that really drive customer value and behaviour. Incorporating external subject matter expertise, external creativity and challenge, external ‘best in class' practices, plus internal best practice bring the experience to get down to the ‘right level' (appropriate to the project objectives).
Benefits of business process redesign can be realised by creating and delivering a target operating model and by setting clear objective for benefits realisation.
Hitachi Consulting Approach
We have significant experience in assisting companies with major process transformation initiatives. Our proven approach takes a strategic view, focuses on business return, anticipates potential risks, facilitates large scale change and delivers significant measurable results.
At Hitachi Consulting, we:
- Adopt a Holistic Approach - We integrate the impact on strategy, people, process and the enabling technologies in our solutions
- Incorporate a Facilitative Style - We implement solutions ‘with you, not to you' and assist in minimising resistance to change
- Utilise an Iterative Approach - The process design and develop stages are cyclical. We exit development once we have effectively tuned the design
- Focus on Business Benefits - We build a business case that sets out the costs and benefits of a BPR initiative, providing strategic, tactical and economic justifications
We have supported many clients in both the public and private sector through a pragmatic and practical BPR approach, as presented below. Our approach, which uses Hitachi Consulting's work in this area, consists of four distinct phases: Assessment and Definition, As - Is Analysis, Redesign and Implementation and Transition.
