ZEROING CHANGE MANAGEMENT TO BUSINESS PROCESS RE-ENGINEERING
IT has often been established how change often comes whether prepared or not, and in most cases it’s more helpful to accept and move along with it than be cynical or rigid. Organisations or businesses that are known to embrace change and integrate it into their business operations from time to time often grow steadily and massively.
Before we look at the concept of business process re-engineering, we must understand the life cycle of a business. A business life cycle is a cyclical representation of the stages an average business goes through from seeding to decline and renewal.
This evolutionary overview helps organisational leaders optimise growth through the key stages, increasing the value of their business.
A study has shown that there are five main stages of the business life cycle, which are launch, growth, success, maturity, and decline.
As a business is launched and goes through growth and success, no matter how massive the organisation is the stage of maturity is reached and it is after this stage that most businesses either undergo a renewal process or begin to grow or decline completely.
To avoid the decline, Business Process re-engineering is engaged.
Business process reengineering (BPR) is a tool used to assist organisations with working on quality, and client administrations, cutting functional expenses and becoming forerunners in their space. BPR could go about as a significant key instrument for competitive advantage.
Reengineering implies dismissing every one of the presumptions and customs of how business has forever been done, and on second thought creating a new, process-focused business association that accomplishes a huge leap forward in execution and performance.
To make reengineering progress, a new viewpoint and approach are required. A perfect piece of paper is taken and, considering what is presently had some significant awareness of customers and their inclinations, another association is created to improve the course of making fulfilled customers. Reengineering is the cycle by which the association that exists today is resigned and the ideal adaptation of the new association is developed.
For example, Zambia’s way of doing business and even the legislature around it could have been established or even reviewed in the 90s and would be beneficial then. But one would ask if such legislation would be helpful in a developing economy over 20 years later.
In the preamble of this article, it is highlighted how the state in Zambia has used too many middlemen in many business processes which could have been helpful when the economy was still young. But in 2022 where the economy has grown and there’s so much technological advancement, middlemen would just be an unnecessary cost and that would only impede effectiveness.
This allows the development of new rules that could be followed in the future rather than following rules made by someone else who is not available to quantify the reason for employing such rules.
We can simply define Business Process Re-engineering as the fundamental rethink and radical redesign of business processes to generate dramatic improvements in critical performance measures such as; cost, quality, service, and speed.
To be practical, the reengineering process requires businesses to start over on a clean slate and rebuild the business better. To succeed in today’s global economy there is a need for organisations to have structures that are fast, flexible, and deliver consistently at a low cost. But most likely traditional businesses are highly unlikely to adapt because of rigidness and inadaptability.
The reality of the matter in this current global environment is that organisations cannot survive using old traditional methods of doing business.
A highly notable business that employed the business reengineering process and succeeded is the IBM Corporation.
IBM Credit finances the computers, software, and services sold by the IBM Corporation. Processing a finance application used to take between six days and two weeks as the application wound its way from the credit department to the pricing department to an administrator who wrote out a formal quote letter.
When IBM Credit realised that processing an application took only about 90-minutes and the rest of the normal processing time was spent with the application sitting on a pile on a specialist’s desk waiting to be looked at, they decided to re-engineer the entire process.
To deal with this situation, IBM employed a reengineering process to shorten the time the process had to occur. So IBM replaced the four experts who recently handled the application with a generalist called the deal structurer who handled the application from beginning to end utilising formats on another PC framework which gave all the information and devices every expert normally utilised.
For unusual cases, the deal structure can still call on specialists to provide additional expertise. The specialist and the deal structure then team up to develop a customized package as required. This happens only rarely, however.
The results from this re-engineering process were noticeable as the turnaround time which was normally seven days was reduced to four hours.
With no expansion in staff numbers, IBM Credit has had the option to accomplish 100 overlap improvements in efficiency it can now deal with multiple times the number of credit applications handled before reengineering was embraced.
No two organisations’ or business circumstances are indistinguishable, and no two organisations will handle reengineering similarly. The main significant component in each reengineering project is that it be aimed at a cycle as opposed to a capability.
All the other things in reengineering come down to strategy or, in other words, that it is correct assuming it works for yourself, and wrong if it doesn’t.
To prevail in re-engineering, organisations ought to observe some rules such as;
• Continuously start with the client and work in reverse.
• Move quickly.
• Endure risk.
• Acknowledge defects en route.
• Try not to stop too early. To put it plainly, Business Process Reengineering is something contrary to the old thing but is less costly and works better.
In the last decade, many miracle cures have been prescribed for the ills of the sub-Saharan countries. Most of them have passed through the countries without discernible effect cures such as aid that have instead caused a bigger issue than the fixing.
Reengineering, in contrast, promises no miracle cure. It offers no simple, quick, and painless fix. On the contrary, it entails difficult, strenuous work.
It requires that people running companies and working in them change how they think as well as what they do. It requires that companies replace their old practices with entirely new ones. Doing so isn’t easy. It cannot be accomplished with motivational lectures and catchy wall posters.
In the next editions of this article, Business Process Reengineering will be discussed in detail. It will also bring out the various aspects or components of the discipline, pointing out where most organizations are getting it wrong, which leads us to give recommendations and proposed solutions.)