Reengineering Work Don't Automate, Obliterate

Executive Summary:

Nowadays the most illustrious practice for improving performance and efficiency in companies is to divert to automation and to try to improve and organize the existing processes. However, knowing that industries are being lead to disappointing results due to the aforementioned straightforward way, and since the old processes are in their selves outdated and inefficient, we will discuss in this document the most appropriate and reliable way of achieving major and guaranteed improvement in performance through process re-engineering. During re-engineering, companies should disconnect from their old way of performing the work and shall redesign their business processes in new innovative ways, which are aligned with the present values and technologies.

Process re-engineering is about unleashing from the existing inherited business processes or part of it that do not add value anymore, and creating new processes adapted to the actual circumstances. The best principles for re-engineering are listed below, and detailed further in the article with real case examples for the ease of implementation:

- Organize around outcomes, not tasks. This principle is related to assigning a single person to all the steps of the process.

- Have those who use the output of the process perform the process. The individuals who need the result of a process can perform it themselves.

- Subsume information-processing work into the real work that produces the information. The organization that produces information shall also process it.

- Treat geographically dispersed resources as though they were centralized. Corporate units shall be introduced to support the divisional stand-alone Units.

- Link parallel activities instead of integrating their results. Create a link between activities or functions while progressing instead of waiting for integrating the results.

- Put the decision point where the work is performed, and build control into the process. The decisions...