Business process re-engineering

Business process re-engineering (BPR) is a business management strategy originally pioneered in the early 1990s, focusing on the analysis and design of workflows and business processes within an organization. BPR aims to help organizations fundamentally rethink how they do their work in order to 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 early BPR proponent Thomas H. Davenport (1990), a business process is a set of logically related tasks performed to achieve a defined business outcome. 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. BPR is influenced by technological innovations as industry players replace old methods of business operations with cost-saving innovative technologies such as automation that can radically transform business operations.

Business process re-engineering is also known as business process redesign, business transformation, or business process change management.

Organizational research suggests that participation in intensive BPR mapping projects can have ambivalent effects on the employees involved: while detailed visualization of "as-is" processes often empowers team members by revealing actionable improvement opportunities, it may simultaneously alienate them from their pre-existing line roles once the magnitude of systemic inefficiencies becomes visible. A longitudinal multi-company study by Huising (2019) documents how experienced managers, after building wall-sized process maps, voluntarily transitioned into peripheral change-management positions in order to drive reforms from outside the traditional hierarchy.