Business process reengineering (BPR) is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of an end-to-end business process to achieve major improvements in performance, such as cost, quality, service, or speed. It changes how work flows across tasks and teams—not merely how quickly the existing workflow runs.
What business process reengineering means
The National Research Council’s 1997 account attributes the widely used definition to Michael Hammer and James Champy: “the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and speed.” National Research Council, Enhancing Organizational Performance
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The key unit of change is the end-to-end process: connected work that produces an outcome. BPR examines how tasks relate, where handoffs occur, and how work crosses department boundaries. It does not treat an isolated task or a department chart as the whole process.
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How BPR differs from automation and smaller improvements
BPR is defined by the scale and focus of the change: it radically redesigns the flow of work to improve important results. Other initiatives may improve performance, but they are not automatically BPR.
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| Approach | Primary focus | How it differs from BPR |
|---|---|---|
| Incremental improvement | Smaller adjustments to an existing process | It improves the current workflow without necessarily rethinking it from the ground up. |
| Automation | Using technology to perform or accelerate work | Automating existing steps can preserve the old process. The National Research Council notes that automation and reengineering are not the same. |
| Restructuring | Organizational units, layers, or reporting relationships | It changes organizational structure; BPR focuses on how work moves through the process, even across existing structures. |
| Business process reengineering | Radical redesign of the end-to-end flow of work | Technology may enable the redesign, but changing the process is central. |
The California Department of Technology’s BPR framework treats technology as an important enabler in many projects while emphasizing analysis and redesign. Adding software without rethinking the workflow, its handoffs, or its outcome is not necessarily BPR.
What a BPR effort involves
The California framework organizes BPR around lifecycle management, business analysis and future definition, process design, and performance measurement. The amount of analysis and formality should fit the project’s size, type, and complexity. A practical sequence is:
- Decide whether radical change is warranted. Define the business case and determine whether the problem calls for a fundamental redesign rather than smaller corrections.
- Set the problem and intended results. Describe the outcome the organization needs and choose performance targets, such as shorter cycle time, fewer errors, or lower cost.
- Document the current process. Validate how work actually moves through the organization, including tasks, handoffs, exceptions, and relevant performance data.
- Design the future process. Model the proposed end-to-end flow, agree on the changes, and implement them. Technology may support the new design.
- Measure and monitor. Compare results with a baseline and the targets, then continue tracking performance after implementation.
IBM’s overview of business process reengineering describes a similar progression: define goals, assess the current state, identify gaps, develop a future state, implement, and evaluate. It also identifies leadership, resources, change management, and employee engagement as important to implementation. BPR has been associated with downsizing and outsourcing, but workforce reduction is not its definition or an inevitable objective.
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Set a baseline before changing the process, specify future targets, and measure the same indicators afterward. The California framework identifies measures that can reveal different kinds of change:
- Speed and flow: cycle time, backlog, and number of handoffs.
- Quality and reliability: errors, exceptions, and scrap or waste.
- Economics and capacity: costs and volume.
Choose measures that match the stated business problem. A redesign intended to reduce delays, for example, should be assessed with a time or backlog measure rather than staffing figures alone. Continue monitoring after implementation; a one-time result does not show whether the new process performs consistently.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Historical examples—and what they do not prove
The National Research Council’s 1997 account reports several well-known examples of process redesign:
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- IBM: The process for receiving a customer order and producing a sales agreement reportedly changed from seven days and six steps to four hours and two steps.
- Ford Motor Company: A reconfiguration of accounts-payable work was associated with a change from 500 employees to 125.
- Taco Bell: The account describes a shift from 70 percent of kitchen area to 70 percent of customer area, alongside reduced costs and faster service.
These are historical cases reported by the National Research Council, not typical results or forecasts for other organizations. The Ford figures describe staffing, not a general measure of BPR success. They also do not establish a current, population-wide BPR success rate.
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