Business process reengineering

Sometimes a process is so broken that tweaking it is hopeless; the only answer is to tear it up and start again. That radical ambition is business process reengineering.

Business process reengineering is the radical redesign of business processes from the ground up to achieve dramatic improvements in performance, rather than incremental tweaks to existing ways of working. Popularised in the 1990s by Michael Hammer and James Champy, it called for fundamentally rethinking how work is done.

Starting from a blank sheet

The defining ambition of reengineering is its radicalism. Rather than improving an existing process step by step, it urges starting from a blank sheet and asking how the work would be designed if the organisation were starting afresh, unconstrained by how things have always been done. The premise is that many processes are the accumulated residue of history, structured around old technologies, departmental boundaries, and assumptions that no longer hold, and that incremental improvement merely refines a fundamentally flawed design. Only radical redesign, reengineering insisted, could deliver dramatic, order-of-magnitude gains.

Process over function

A central theme was reorganising work around end-to-end processes rather than narrow functional departments. Traditional organisations divide work into functional silos, through which a process is handed from department to department, accumulating delay, error, and nobody owning the whole. Reengineering sought to redesign around the complete process that delivers value to the customer, often enabled by information technology, collapsing the fragmented hand-offs into streamlined, coherent flows. The aim was processes designed for the outcome, not inherited from the organisation chart.

Promise and backlash

Reengineering swept through business in the 1990s, promising dramatic transformation, but its record was decidedly mixed, and it provoked a backlash. Many efforts failed, and in practice reengineering often became a euphemism for mass layoffs, its radical ambition reduced to cost-cutting that hollowed out organisations and demoralised survivors. Critics charged that it underestimated the human dimension, treating people as components to be redesigned, and that its disruption frequently destroyed more than it created. The lesson drawn was that radical process change, while sometimes necessary, is perilous and must attend to the people who make processes work.

Business process reengineering was a bold call to rethink how work is done from first principles, redesigning processes radically around outcomes rather than refining inherited, fragmented ways of working. Its insight, that some processes need fundamental redesign rather than incremental improvement, retains real force, but its troubled record and association with brutal downsizing left a cautionary legacy: that radical change is risky, that it often disappoints, and that any redesign of work which ignores the human beings who carry it out is likely to fail.