Business process redesign – concept

When we start the steps to map processes in a company, the first result we find is what we call process mapping AS IS. It’s an x-ray of the current situation of each process: how it is done, who is responsible, what are the bigger adversities, weaknesses and more importantly its improvements opportunities.

After this survey, the documentation and projection begins, establishing the future situation desired for the process. This future functioning is usually called TO BE, and is represented in a flow or diagram, the redesign itself.

Therefore, what we know as the business process redesign is the way that the processes must work in the future. The redesign combines the improvements that can be made (and were found during the process mapping AS IS) and the best market practices and incorporates these to the business process. Read more about the process on our website, and learn why you must aim for process quality, and how to use business process redesign, a key BPM initiative for that.

The goal of the business process redesign is to improve the processes from beginning to end, cutting unproductive activities, and reducing work fragmentation – giving everybody a clear sense of responsibility for the processes. All this brings significant betterments in productivity, cycle time and quality.

Business process redesign – planning the new process

This stage consists in redesign again the flawed existing process. It starts as soon as the analysis of the current process ends. The project of a new process is developed in a way that meets the new goals and organizational strategies, serves the technological transformations, molds according to the expectations’ clients changes, follows the legal alterations, predicts systems and equipment obsolescence, corrects the found dysfunctions and incorporates the needed improvements.

The concept of the new process starts when the design team reviews all of the work that was carried out in earlier stages. They find the problems to address and the innovation to enable, besides defining the criteria and targets to use on the design of the business process.

Based on that information, and also after acknowledging other practices through benchmarking among peer organizations, providing support to the process TO BE, the design team drafts the new process map, more optimized and with the higher number of improvements possible.

Redesign guideline examples:

• Replace the focus from the internal procedures to the demand supply.
• Cut all the losses caused by slowness, bottleneck, rework, activity’s duplicity, tasks that do not add any value to the client, etc.
• Improve consistency of the process performance.
• Enhance the communication between areas.
• Automatize everything possible, using TI in its maximum.
• Standardize the service.

After the new process’ mapping, the team establishes all of the recommendations intrinsic to the process implementation and documents the flows and descriptions, so that everybody has access to the new organizational procedures. Now you know what business process redesign is, check out this post about business process improvements.