BPR to BPM

Business process reengineering in 1990s created a hype which was as far reaching as the concept it self was. But was reengineering successful? The answer is both yes and no. No, because the number of companies that attempted and failed to reengineer their processes was much more than those who were successful at it. Yes, because, BPR in general has put the emphasis on organizing work around processes, rather than around tasks. Also automation got prominence as a means to improve business performance and not IT performance. This shift in focus was the real gain for the industry.

BPR gained popularity during times when the industry was in a fix in the face of constantly changing environment. More or less the companies found their backs to the wall. Breakthrough improvement was the bare requisite of the day for established companies in corporate America to survive against the nimble startups and competitively superior overseas firms. Lack of end-to-end process perspective and style of working which suited times of a bygone era provided the platform from which the breakthrough improvements can be launched. And the evolving power of IT, which was only inadequately and superficially being used in the industry, provided the fuel to embark on reengineering journey. The promise of discontinuous improvements also required discontinuity in the way work is conducted – anything less than a perfect score on this account is a sure road to failure - and this was the general experience of the industry.

BPM tools have taken the advantage of the BPR experience and conceptually are more flexible in terms of expanse and intensity. Unlike BPR which targets end-to-end process by radically redesigning it, BPM tools can be applied part by part to the whole enterprize at a time, by adopting much more manageable and smaller changes in the process. This way the investments, risks and amount of change are minimized but at the same time the tangible impact is much more modest than what was a possibility with BPR. Yet BPM tools for automating processes have their basis on the fundamental concepts that were emphasized by BPR, such as:

• Simple processes delivering on the metrics of quality, service, flexibility
• Focus on eliminating non-value adding activities
• Decisions becoming integral part of the process

BPM unifies discrete tools through extension of technologies like BPR, EAI, Workflow automation and any other business application package in such a form where the implementation and upgradation is much easily handled and underlying business process are efficiently managed. In addition to the strength inherited from BPR that BPM is built around business processes and not business applications per se, yet another promising feature of BPM is that it is based on mathematical process models. Which means that business process performance can be continuously improved and optimized during the operations.

Key aspects on which BPM differs BPR is shown below:

Marked difference between BPR and BPM
Aspect	BPR	BPM
Level of change	Radical, one step change	Evolutionary & continuous
Time taken for implementation	Long	Short time and smooth takeover
Starting point	Drawing board	Current processes and automation levels
Implementation	Huge effort required for the disruptive change	Incremental
Expanse	One major process at a time	Flexible – simultaneously across one or more / small or major processes
Methodology	Redesigning of business processes	Process and decision models
Enabling technology	Primarily IT	Primarily process technology
Involvement	Business and process experts	Process experts and all related people
Risk	High	Low
Outcome	Drastic	Incremental improvement
Cultural issues	Major concern	Not much concern
Implementation stress and concern	High	Low