Radical Redesign: The Power of Business Process Reengineering

Louis Balla

Rethinking Work from the Ground Up

Business process reengineering is the radical redesign of core business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical performance measures such as cost, quality, service, and speed. Unlike incremental tweaks, BPR involves fundamentally rethinking how work gets done—often starting from scratch.

Quick Answer: What is Business Process Reengineering?

Radical approach: Complete overhaul of processes, not small improvements
Focus areas: Cost reduction, quality improvement, faster delivery, improved service
When to use: Performance stagnation, major market changes, or technological disruption
Key difference: BPR is radical; Business Process Improvement (BPI) is incremental
Success factors: Strong leadership, effective change management, technology enablement

The concept emerged in the early 1990s when Michael Hammer’s Harvard Business Review article, “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate,” argued for a powerful new approach: don’t just speed up broken processes with technology—eliminate and reinvent them entirely.

For companies running NetSuite, BPR represents an opportunity to maximize your ERP investment. By rethinking processes from the ground up, organizations can open up the full potential of platforms like NetSuite and transform how they operate.

I’m Louis Balla, CRO and partner at Nuage. With over 15 years of experience in digital change, I’ve seen how BPR helps NetSuite customers separate themselves from the competition by opening up their ERP’s full potential.

Business process reengineering vocabulary:

What Is Business Process Reengineering and Why Does It Matter?

Business process reengineering isn’t about tweaking what you’re already doing. It’s about asking a harder question: Should we be doing this at all?

At its heart, BPR means fundamentally rethinking and radically redesigning how your company operates to achieve dramatic improvements. The concept, popularized in the 1990s by thinkers like Michael Hammer in his article “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate”, challenges businesses to stop automating broken processes and instead eliminate work that doesn’t add value. The goal is to organize work around outcomes and customer value, not fragmented departmental tasks.

For businesses running NetSuite, BPR represents an opportunity to maximize your ERP investment. By rethinking processes from the ground up, you can open up the full potential of platforms like NetSuite and transform how you operate.

BPR vs. BPI vs. BPM: Understanding the Difference

It’s easy to confuse BPR with similar terms, but they represent fundamentally different approaches. Choosing the wrong one can waste months of effort.

Feature	Business Process Reengineering (BPR)	Business Process Improvement (BPI)	Business Process Management (BPM)
Approach	Radical, fundamental rethinking, complete overhaul	Incremental, iterative adjustments to existing processes	Continuous, ongoing discipline for process governance & optimization
Scope	Organization-wide, cross-functional, focuses on core processes	Specific processes or functional areas	Holistic, encompasses all organizational processes
Goal	Dramatic, breakthrough improvements (cost, quality, service, speed)	Gradual, steady improvements to efficiency and effectiveness	Sustained operational excellence, agility, and strategic alignment
Timeframe	Project-based, typically months to years	Ongoing, short-term cycles	Long-term, permanent organizational capability
Risk Level	High (due to radical change and potential disruption)	Low to moderate	Moderate (focus on continuous adaptation)
Technology Role	Transformative, enables entirely new ways of working	Supports existing processes, automates tasks	Supports process monitoring, automation, and continuous optimization
Example	Rebuilding an entire supply chain from scratch	Optimizing a single step in the order fulfillment process	Establishing a system for ongoing monitoring and improvement of all customer-facing processes

Think of it this way: BPI is renovation. You’re making incremental fixes. BPR is demolition and rebuilding. It’s riskier but necessary for fundamental breakdowns. BPM is ongoing maintenance and governance of all processes. Knowing the difference is key to choosing the right tool for your situation.

Key Drivers: Why Companies Choose Radical Change

Organizations undertake the disruption of BPR when survival demands it. Key drivers include:

Performance stagnation: When incremental improvements consistently fail to move the needle.
Increased competition: The need to keep pace with rivals who are adopting BPR practices.
Technological disruption: AI, cloud, and automation enabling entirely new ways of working.
Scalability challenges: When processes that worked for a small team break under the strain of growth.
Poor customer satisfaction: A clear sign that internal processes are creating friction instead of value.
High operational costs: An indicator of deep-seated waste, redundancy, and complexity.
Regulatory mandates: When new industry or legal requirements make existing workflows obsolete.

The Major Benefits of a Successful BPR Initiative

When BPR works, it transforms a business. The benefits are not marginal; they are fundamental shifts in how a company operates.

Cost reduction: Eliminating waste and automating tasks can cut operational expenses dramatically.
Improved quality: Designing processes to prevent errors, not just catch them, leads to more consistent outcomes.
Faster time-to-market: Streamlining development and delivery provides a crucial competitive edge.
Improved productivity: Removing bottlenecks and empowering employees with better tools and processes.
Greater agility and innovation: Flexible processes allow for rapid adaptation to market changes and foster a culture of innovation.
Boosted customer satisfaction: Designing processes around customer needs leads to better service and higher loyalty.
Competitive advantage: Achieving breakthrough improvements in cost, quality, and speed simultaneously.

The BPR Implementation Playbook: A Step-by-Step Guide

Starting on a business process reengineering journey requires a disciplined approach. While every initiative is unique, the fundamental phases remain consistent. Here’s how we guide clients from their current state to a radically improved future.

Phase 1: Define Vision and Analyze Current State

Before you redesign anything, you must establish your “why” and get brutally honest about your current reality.

Define a clear goal: Use SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) to create a concrete objective.
Secure leadership commitment: BPR lives or dies based on executive sponsorship. It is not a grassroots initiative.
Assemble a cross-functional team: Bring together senior managers, operations experts, and project managers.
Map current workflows: Gather data from systems and interviews to create a detailed picture of how work actually gets done.
Identify bottlenecks and gaps: Analyze the map to pinpoint where processes slow down, break, or contain redundant steps.
Set key performance indicators (KPIs): Establish benchmarks before you change anything to measure success later.

Phase 2: Design the Future and Test

This is where creativity meets pragmatism as you reimagine how work should be done.

Rethink every assumption: Challenge legacy constraints and design streamlined, customer-focused workflows. Your new process map should look dramatically different from the old one.
Test before you leap: Build a small-scale prototype or run a pilot program. This low-risk environment allows you to validate the new process, gather feedback, and refine the design before a disruptive, company-wide rollout.

The Role of Technology in Modern Business Process Reengineering

Technology isn’t just a supporting character in BPR—it’s often the lead actor, enabling changes that were previously impossible.

Automation (RPA) eliminates repetitive, manual tasks, freeing up employees for more strategic work.
AI and process mining analyze system data to uncover hidden inefficiencies and bottlenecks you’d never spot manually.
ERP systems like NetSuite ERP serve as the foundation, integrating siloed departments into a single, cohesive system.
Cloud computing provides the scalability and flexibility to adapt reengineered processes as your business evolves.
CRM systems built on platforms like Salesforce consolidate customer data to deliver personalized experiences.
Digital collaboration tools keep cross-functional BPR teams aligned and connected.

The key is to reengineer the process first, then apply technology. As Michael Hammer warned, automating a broken process only helps you do the wrong things faster.

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Navigating the Problems: Challenges, Risks, and Success Factors

The reality of business process reengineering is sobering: studies show 50-70% of projects fail to deliver their promised results. The problem isn’t usually the technology or the process maps. It’s the people.

Key challenges include:

Employee resistance: When you radically change how people work, their natural instinct is to push back. Mid-level managers often feel the most threatened.
Culture misalignment: You can’t bolt new processes onto a culture that doesn’t support them.
Inadequate change management: Focusing on technology while treating people as an afterthought is a recipe for failure.
Lack of leadership commitment: Without visible, consistent championship from the top, momentum evaporates.
Insufficient resources: BPR requires significant investment in time, money, and skilled people. Trying to do it on the cheap rarely works.
Scope creep: The radical nature of BPR can lead to projects becoming unwieldy and impossible to complete.
A historical reputation for being synonymous with layoffs, which creates fear and distrust from the start.

The Critical Role of Leadership and Change Management

The success of business process reengineering lives or dies on two things: strong leadership and effective change management.

Leadership commitment means senior leaders must visibly champion the change, articulate the vision, and actively remove obstacles. Research shows projects with effective sponsors are nearly three times more likely to succeed.

A comprehensive change management strategy is equally vital. This includes:

A clear communication plan to explain the ‘why’ and ‘what’s in it for me.’
Employee training and development to build the new skills required.
A plan for addressing resistance by listening to concerns and providing support. As Harvard Business Review notes in Ten Reasons People Resist Change, this resistance is often rooted in legitimate anxiety.

Effective change management is about bringing people along on the journey, not just implementing a new process map.

Critical Success Factors for Business Process Reengineering

To beat the odds, focus on the factors that separate successful initiatives from the statistics, many of which are highlighted in the U.S. GAO’s Business Process Re-engineering Assessment Guide.

Top-down sponsorship: BPR must be initiated and relentlessly supported by the C-suite.
A clear vision: Define exactly what success looks like with measurable goals.
An empowered BPR team: Assemble a cross-functional team and give them real authority.
Adequate IT infrastructure: Be prepared to invest in enabling tools like NetSuite.
Relentless customer focus: Every decision should be driven by customer needs and value.
A focus on processes, not functions: Shift from departmental silos to end-to-end value delivery.
Discontinuous thinking: Be willing to challenge every assumption about how work gets done.
A continuous improvement mindset: Build mechanisms for ongoing refinement after the initial redesign.

BPR in Action: Real-World Examples and Outcomes

Theory is one thing, but the real power of business process reengineering comes to life in the stories of organizations that took the leap. These classic case studies show what’s possible with radical redesign.

Ford Motor Company: Reengineering Accounts Payable

In the early 1990s, Ford’s accounts payable department employed over 500 people. After seeing that Mazda’s much smaller team was more efficient, Ford took Michael Hammer’s advice from his Harvard Business Review article to “obliterate, not automate.”

They redesigned the entire purchase-to-pay process. Instead of matching invoices to purchase orders, the system triggered payment automatically when goods were received at the loading dock. By eliminating the invoice entirely, Ford reduced its accounts payable headcount by 75% while improving accuracy and speed.

IBM Credit Corp: Slashing Turnaround Times

IBM’s process for issuing credit to customers was painfully slow, taking six days to two weeks. An analysis revealed the actual work took only 90 minutes; the rest was wasted time as paperwork moved between specialists.

IBM’s radical solution was to replace the specialists with generalists—single individuals who could handle an entire application from start to finish, supported by expert systems for complex cases. This complete redesign reduced the credit issuance cycle time by 90%, from days to mere hours or minutes, boosting sales and customer satisfaction.

Customer Service Change: Modern Approaches

Today, BPR increasingly focuses on the customer experience. Modern customer service reengineering involves creating cross-functional teams empowered to solve problems end-to-end, rather than bouncing customers between departments.

Technology is central to this shift. Companies leverage platforms like NetSuite to integrate customer data, giving service teams a complete view of each customer’s history. CRM implementations using platforms like Salesforce track interactions across every touchpoint. AI-powered chatbots handle routine inquiries, freeing human agents for complex issues. The most successful changes are designed from the customer’s perspective, leading to dramatic improvements in satisfaction and loyalty.

Frequently Asked Questions about Business Process Reengineering

As a concept, business process reengineering can seem daunting. Here are answers to some of the most common questions we’ve encountered over 20+ years in digital change.

When is BPR the right strategy over incremental improvement?

Use BPR for fundamental breakdowns, major market shifts, or when small improvements have stopped working. If a process is structurally broken (like a rusted engine), you need to reengineer. If it’s just inefficient but functional (like a flat tire), incremental improvement (BPI) is the better, lower-risk choice.

What is the most common reason BPR projects fail?

The number one reason is neglecting the human element. Failure most often stems from poor leadership, inadequate change management, and employee resistance. You can design the world’s best process, but if your employees don’t understand it, believe in it, or feel supported through the transition, it will fail.

How long does a typical BPR project take?

The duration varies wildly with scope. Reengineering a single, well-defined process in a smaller company might take a few months. A comprehensive, organization-wide BPR initiative, especially one involving a new ERP implementation, can easily span one to several years. The timeline depends on the project’s complexity, the number of processes involved, and the resources dedicated to it.

Conclusion: Is Your Business Ready for a Radical Redesign?

Business process reengineering is a powerful, strategic approach to organizational change. It’s not about small tweaks; it’s about radically redesigning core processes to achieve dramatic improvements in cost, quality, and speed. In today’s fast-moving digital landscape, clinging to outdated processes is a strategic risk.

For companies running enterprise systems like NetSuite, BPR is the key to opening up your platform’s full potential. It helps you move beyond automating old habits to truly changing how you operate.

At Nuage, our 20+ years of experience in digital change have shown us that with strong leadership and a focus on people, radical redesign is not only possible but essential for market leaders. If you’re ready to stop patching broken processes and build something better, the power of BPR awaits.

Optimize your business with our NetSuite solutions and let us help you chart a course for radical success.