Meet Changing Business Needs Without Software

Business Process Improvement vs Business Process Re-Engineering

Business Process Improvement (BPI) differs from Business Process Re-Engineering (BPR) in that it focuses on incremental changes rather than a radical redesign of your entire business. This approach makes a BPI initiative manageable without causing major disruptions in your organization’s day to day work. Unlike BPR, BPI can be used to evaluate your organization at both an enterprise-level with an emphasis on strategy, culture, and structure, and an in-depth process level with an emphasis on addresses process pain points.

Why BPI?

Evaluating your organization’s processes to identify areas of improvement may seem like a daunting task, but it may offer you more value in a short period of time, or concurrent with other things occurring or other projects being managed, which may be essential if your organization is already overloaded yet needs to make changes. BPI efforts offer substantial value to your organization by providing opportunities to achieve immediate solutions to get you back on your feet without the need for a lengthy and expensive system implementation.

However, if a system implementation project is on the horizon, performing a BPI analysis of your organization is a great precursor, or something to manage simultaneously. BPI analysis now will help to ensure optimized processes will be implemented as part of the new software solution. Additionally, it can help with implementing meaningful changes to address issues now instead rather than waiting for the new system. Furthermore, even in a post-implementation time period, additional BPI work can help better leverage the software in which you just invested heavily.

Which methodology do you use?

There are numerous methodologies which all have their merits, depending on the situation. In general, though, they all strive to address opportunities for improvement by evaluating how things are done within the organization, including:

1. Breaking down business processes for easy analysis
2. Identifying opportunities for improvement within processes
3. Designing new processes
4. Helping stakeholders understand how the business is run
5. Eliminating unnecessary process waste
   

Here are some questions on methodology to consider before embarking on a BPI effort:

1. Which one will meet your needs the best?
2. Do you have to use just one?
3. Do you stop after you have fixed some of your processes and have realized some gain?
4. Should you consider implementing a continuous improvement model as part of your organization’s strategy?
5. Do you focus on just process improvements or do you consider technology improvements as well?

Have questions? Linea can help.

Linea Solutions has been helping our clients with improving their processes since our inception over 20 years ago. If your organization is considering a BPI initiative, contact us to see how we can help. Linea not only identifies the issues in your organization but will follow through to implement these solutions in a way that enables maximum leverage of the proposed solutions.

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