Transforming Your Organization with Business Process Reengineering

Want to reduce operational costs, improve quality, and deliver exceptional customer service? The solution isn't magic: you already have the tools—you just need the vision to galvanize it.

"We have the tools to do what we need to do. Information technology offers many options for reorganizing work. But our imaginations must guide our decisions about technology—not the other way around. We must have the boldness to imagine taking 78 days out of an 80-day turnaround time, cutting 75% of overhead, and eliminating 80% of errors. These are not unrealistic goals. If managers have the vision, reengineering will provide a way." 

- Michael Hammer, Harvard Business Review, July–August 1990   
 

Business process reengineering (BPR) fundamentally focuses on reducing costs and improving effectiveness, efficiency, and quality of work. Although the term was coined decades ago, BPR is still finding new ways to solve problems for businesses and the government. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report estimates that $552 billion has been saved since 2010 due to Congress and executive branch agencies addressing GAO-identified opportunities for business process improvement. 

To keep pace with quickly advancing technology and ongoing customer interactions, the government must shift how it runs through real innovation to improve performance dramatically. Using BPR, LMI helps federal government agencies uncover and address opportunities for improvement, create plans of action for transformations, and implement new processes. Then, we support agencies during sustainment until it's time to reimagine the process again.

Challenge

Many obstacles trigger the need for BPR:

• Redundant or overlapping regulations with unnecessary administrative burdens on customers and employees.
• Confusing or unclear regulations adding costs for organizations and customer frustration. 
• Conflicting policies confounding customers and dissuading them from continuing or requiring additional interactions.

Fortunately, reengineering business processes reduces customer wait times, speeds delivery of goods and services through streamlined procurement processes, and improves accuracy of data for better decision-making.

However, not all BPR initiatives experience success. Studies show that between 60–70 percent of change programs or BPR initiatives fail ¹. Lack of direction or unclear agency mission and goals prevent employees from understanding their tasks, how their work supports the organization, and how their customers (citizens) benefit from their work. Sometimes metrics target activity instead of outcomes, causing organizations to lose focus on the intended results and accidentally encouraging the wrong behavior or toxic organizational cultures. 

Solution

BPR fundamentally redesigns business processes to significantly improve performance, efficiency, quality, and customer satisfaction. BPR focuses on outcomes, radically reorganizing workflows, information systems, and organizational structures to create new and more effective operations. This systematic and data-driven approach achieves standardization, built-in quality, efficiency through automation, improved operations, and reduced expenditures.

LMI's innovative approach to BPR in government agencies uncovers and prioritizes opportunities for improvement aligned with agency missions and goals, while supporting citizen needs. We emphasize the importance of the fiduciary trust of citizens on government agencies. LMI helps organizations support strategic objectives, engage with new customers, and offer new services.

LMI not only has advanced practitioners prioritizing, assessing, and addressing the right problems experienced with a variety of BPR tools (lean, six sigma, agile, human-centered design [HCD], etc.), we leverage these tools as a foundation for other transformational work to further our BPR initiatives. 

Outcomes

LMI achieves the following outcomes for organizations with BPR:

• Healthy business processes with a minimum administrative burden that still fully comply with policies. 
• Policies freed from process work and language, leaving clear, concise, easily understood regulations. 
• A robust understanding of the customer experience and specific requirements, contributing to strategic decisions delivering the highest return on investment and solutions offering an optimum user experience. 
• Improvements to maximize value for the organization.
• Concentration on the government customer experience (CX), aligned with Executive Order 14058 to transform the federal CX and service delivery to rebuild trust in government.
• Work that leverages employee resources, knowledge, and skills and improves employee efficiency and performance. 
• Increased customer and employee engagement and maximized adoption using HCD and change management methods. 

Action

Organizations must adapt to advancing technology, changing customer behavior and expectations, and ongoing alignments to industry best practices. To protect limited resources and build government trust and customer satisfaction, organizations must continuously engage in process reengineering. BPR goes beyond automation; it creates streamlined processes, introducing radical, smarter ones through strategic and mindful development and implementation.

BPR is a continuous, iterative journey, not an end state. LMI approaches BPR with a comprehensive, systems-level view aligned to strategic objectives. We uncover and measure what matters most to customers and employees. LMI recommends sustainable changes and incorporates its expertise and capabilities in change management throughout the BPR process. LMI's BPR expertise and creativity in leveraging supportive tools, such as HCD, CX, and change management, make us a trusted partner and experienced guide on the ongoing path of BPR.

Contact LMI today to discuss how we can transform your government agency with BPR practices.