How to use what reengineering can offer your organisation
To compete in today’s business world, you must provide customers with quality products and services. Otherwise they’ll go elsewhere. To compete, you may have to abandon outdated notions about how your organisation does its work and start afresh. This is the essence of reengineering - a process of improving the old ways of doing business and creating new and better ways. Here’s how your organisation can benefit from reengineering...
1. Consider ‘reinventing’ your business.
Look critically at the way things happen in your organisation. Ask yourself, ‘If we were starting again from scratch, how would we do (what-ever we are doing)?’ That’s what reengineering encourages - redesigning selected processes to dramatically improve competitiveness and productivity. This may require making really tough decisions includ-ing selling-off, combining, or closing down areas of your business that don’t fit with where you want to be.
2. Focus on processes.
Processes become your new basic building blocks. Improving processes or practices (what people do and how they do it) is the way to decrease turn-round time. By reducing turn-round time (and improving quality), you become increasingly competitive: more work-in-progress should mean greater profits. Remember, more than 85 per cent of problems in most organisations are process-related.
3. Emphasise and promote the need for change.
Reengineering reconstructs work into multi-task jobs, and that inevitably demands a fundamental shift in employees' perspectives. Your never-ending pursuit of best practices in the fields in which you operate provides an ideal catalyst for meaningful change. But one of your principal roles will also be to act in a ‘gatekeeper’ capacity, to control the introduction of change processes. Your challenge will be to build in a change process enabling staff to respond positively.
