One of the key factors of any successful business is to be constantly assessing and reinventing itself.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you launch a new product or service, that is not what we mean.

But as time moves forward and new helpful technologies emerge, it is always wise to take a look at your existing business processes and see where and when it might be possible to tweak them for improvements. 

Invite your team to participate in these decisions, as they will be the ones more familiar with daily processes and where it might be best to switch things up. With the tools available today, it has never been easier to visualize these processes to find the weak spots.

Software such as Skore makes business process reengineering more efficient and more collaborative for the entire organization – let’s delve into how!

Reminder: What Is Business Process Reengineering? 

Before we truly get started, let’s review what business process reengineering actually is.

Business process reengineering, also known as BPR, is the decision and then action of changing your business’s major functions to increase efficiency, improve quality, and-or to decrease costs. To do this, businesses will create and visualise their processes through flow diagrams such as the ones you can make with Skore, finding and identifying areas of improvement. 

Someone can specialise specifically in this work and be known as a BPR specialist – that’s how important it is. These people will be in charge of identifying the improvement areas and then ensuring that the transition to new workflows goes smoothly.

It’s different from business process improvement, which is solely focused on updating your business’s current processes.

Business process reengineering will instead result in fundamentally different systems across your organization. It means significant and absolute change at the very beginning of all your existing processes. After all, to make an omelette, you have to crack a few eggs.

There are four steps to follow when conducting business process reengineering.

Firstly, professionals will need to understand all the company’s processes and identify problem areas. This means having access to all existing workflows and a backlog of information that led to the decisions to make the workflows as they currently exist. Not all of this will be readily available, which itself may be an indicator of something to fix in the process. 

As soon as a problem is identified, it must be communicated to the relevant stakeholders in the organisation. Skore makes it easy to visualise these for both your own processes and for clients. With Skore, stakeholders and clients can understand and follow along with the current workflow and with the suggested improvements.

Once the issue has been identified and communicated, and everyone is in agreement that it needs to be changed, it’s time to take action to fix it. This means assembling and bringing in an expert team. 

Two essential players here are a senior-level employee and an operational employee. You will need the senior-level employee to oversee the bigger tasks and have access to important information, and having someone that is on the ground with processes and operations will be incredibly helpful for the next part. Additional team members can be selected based on need.

Having assembled your team and found your problem, you now analyse it further. What are the measurable KPIs that tell you it is not working and would be able to demonstrate if anything changes? And what would you have to change to make it visible? 

Make different flow charts with different results depending on what you can switch up. Follow along to the logical end result each time to get an idea of what will have the best and greatest impact.

Finally, you implement the change and see the results play out in real time, saving your business money and resources.

Why Do Business Processes Need to Be Reengineered?

Why would businesses reengineer their processes from the ground up when they can just keep improving them?

It all boils down to five key factors, which we will be examining in detail.

Updating company vision

The first thing business process reengineering helps with is revisiting the company’s mission and vision.

Companies change over time, because markets, culture, and sensitivities change. If a company wants to remain relevant and competitive, it will need to adjust accordingly to the times. To make sure you don’t stagnate, reengineering business processes allow leaders to re-familiarise themselves with their products and services and come up with new ways to attract customers.

A great example here from the last decade is Netflix: going from a rental service to a streaming service and becoming a pioneer. Because they were willing to reengineer their business processes, they came up with a blueprint that made them unique in the market before multiple other companies followed their lead.

Simple operations are best

The worst thing for any business process is over complication.

Just like when you’re trying to train for a sporting event and the best thing you can do is simplify your diet to protein and non-processed foods instead of relying on fad diets or super smoothie mixes, taking everything down to basics is best.

By making your business processes simple and streamlined, your operations will flow naturally, effortlessly, and efficiently. Remove obstacles by analysing and reengineering your business processes to arrive at straightforward solutions and workflows.

This results in happy employees and happy customers, as everything works correctly and without too many hoops to get through. 

Increased efficiency

Every business wants to be efficient. To do this, you need to study your operations in your organisation and make sure they are simple and streamlined. 

Less time spent by employees trying to figure out processes means more time dedicated to getting things done instead of just waiting to move them along. Increasing efficiency is a very easy and achievable result of business process reengineering.

Better results and products

As a direct consequence of the above, your products or services will increase in quality because your employees will have more time to dedicate to them. They will not be worried about how the work should flow, but about making sure it happens.

Your company will also have more time to be reactive to feedback from customers instead of making sure processes are flowing correctly, thereby improving the quality of your customer’s experience with you.

This leads to our next and final point.

More profit

Business process reengineering is absolutely responsible for more profit and greater ROI for companies. 

If we think of the Netflix example mentioned previously, reengineering their entire process and brand allowed them to become an untouchable giant for quite a few years, and absolutely increased their revenue.

Business process reengineering leads to lower operating costs, more accurate company goals, better communication, and higher quality of products or services. All of which result in higher profits.

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How to Reengineer Business Processes 

So how should you go about reengineering your business processes?

Well, let’s take a look at some of our clients here at Skore and how their situation fits with our five key factors.

Foxability

Our client Foxability helps companies figure out which cloud-based software will help them best for their business needs. They are constantly evaluating business processes and searching for ways to improve them.

When they came across Skore, magic happened.

Not only was Skore useful in demonstrating places for improvement for their clients, but it also allowed them to map the necessary steps to get there and what that improvement would look like. The team at Foxability makes multiple flow charts or process maps with Skore to demonstrate real-time monetary gains from reengineering processes based on the new technology available, leading to more streamlined operations, increased efficiency, and better company results overall.

And Skore’s simple and easy-to-follow approach to map visualization allows this to happen daily.

NHS

When the NHS Trusts in South London were looking to improve their mental health services operations for children and youths, they turned to Change Platform Consulting to revisit their existing processes and how they may be able to change them.

This was quite a tall order for the consulting firm, as the NHS’s existing processes had been unchanged for quite some time. It required an entirely new workflow: a business process reengineering.

In stepped Skore.

Using Skore, the consulting firm led a series of workshops to understand and evaluate the current processes. They were able to reconfirm and envision the new goals and design new, streamlined processes that aligned with the new vision.

The results of their reengineering saw success within the first nine months: 

• A 75% reduction in the children and youths of the area being found outside it
• Inpatient wards capacity in the area increased from 52% to 90%
• A 12% underspend against budget

Business process reengineering worked marvellously and all the parts of the process that were changed had a significant effect, of that there is no doubt. Reviewing your process and analysing it to find where you can make things different will absolutely have lasting impact. 

Lawrence & Wedlock

The team at Lawrence & Wedlock, an automation services provider, was already familiar with cutting-edge technology and software. What they needed was a way to make the RPA process discovery workflow more agile.

Along came Skore.

Prior to making contact with us, they were using a variety of tools that made it hard to keep track of who had access to what, where, and when, and were not collaborative or well-integrated with each other. It slowed everything down and made them inefficient.

With Skore, their average process discovery time with a client went down by a full week.

Using Skore with their clients also meant that the clients could understand and visualize their processes better. When improvements or reengineering were needed based on the work Lawrence & Wedlock provide, it was easy to see the outcome and explain it. 

More streamlined operations meant a more efficient team, resulting in better service for their clients. And of course, an increase in profit and clients. 

Bovis Homes

Similar to the NHS, Bovis Homes has a long history of processes having a certain workflow.

Bovis Homes ran through the entirety of our five key reengineering points. 

They had experienced a period of rapid growth and needed to reevaluate their company vision and goals following this. Yes, they had grown, but the processes did not reflect this growth yet. And it was felt across the company.

So they went back to the drawing board and reconsidered. 

They used Skore to revisit processes and change them as they went along, ensuring that they were creating procedures and best practices that aligned with industry standards for health, quality, and safety. And they did this collaboratively with teams and stakeholders from seven regions in the UK, all with just one software. They then made sure that every role was accounted for and that those that needed access at every pertinent level could consult back to what was built. 

Their key mission was to once again place the customer at the centre of their business following their period of growth. Bovis Homes made use of Skore to reengineer their existing, previous business processes to look towards the future. As they continue to edit and improve their procedures across all their regions, they are able to go back to Skore and add notes and new factors to take into account. 

They are streamlining their processes constantly to arrive at higher efficiency and better products for their customers and better systems for their workers, to achieve even greater profit heights.

Conclusion

Business process reengineering is not easy. It takes time and means you have to be willing to accept big changes.

But as our clients prove, the payoff is worth it.

Skore makes business process reengineering easier than ever with our simple, streamlined approach to process mapping, and our team of experts willing to walk you through how best to make use of our software.

No more wondering about could be’s or should’s, just efficiency and more revenue for you and your business.

What are you waiting for?

Get in touch with us to book a demo today!