The COVID-19 pandemic has provided organisations with a huge task of rethinking their business models, modes of operation and operation processes. Many businesses around the world have suffered the loss of revenue while others have completely shut down.

A survey conducted by the Ministry of Commerce in Zambia revealed that 71% of the sampled enterprises indicated that their businesses were partially closed while 14% were completely closed. Only 15% reported having maintained normal operations. 

Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) can help you to implement changes to your business processes in order to remain relevant to your customers.

What is Business Process Re-engineering?

Business process re-engineering is the radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical aspects like quality, output, cost, service, and speed. 

BPR aims at restructuring an organisation around processes with a focus on serving the customer.

During this pandemic, digitisation of business processes is one of the significant changes that many organisations have prioritised. Restructuring your business process in these times demands that all your changes should revolve around technology.

You can automate some tasks through the use of artificial intelligence, you can choose to move your physical store to a virtual market or you can consider migrating your core business functions to the cloud to increase collaboration.

We created an online purchase requisition system which allows the client’s employees to create, submit and track their requests. This system reduces errors, saves time and has made request approvals much easier. 

Regardless of how you restructure your business, you should be able to reduce costs, accelerate processes and improve quality.

Let’s look at some of the benefits of re-engineering your organisational processes during the pandemic

Customer satisfaction

Matching your organisational processes with customer expectations assures you of their loyalty. When you modify your business processes according to the current needs, you will be able to design, manufacture and market a product that is of value to your customers. This, in turn, promotes customer retention.

Productivity

When you streamline your business processes by removing redundancies and automating some tasks, productivity increases, This is because your employees will focus on more important core functions, thereby yielding higher output and improving the quality of their work.

Lowered costs

A direct result of higher productivity within an organization is the lowered expenses. When your employees become efficient at their work, they use fewer resources and produce better results. Especially during this pandemic, your goal should be to have a higher output at lower costs or the same output for the same process costs. 

Agility

Adopting a business re-engineering process gives your organisation the speed needed to react and adapt to change. A well-implemented BPR allows you to implement new strategies in your operations immediately when a problem is detected. The ability to make adjustments at the first sign of a problem reduces losses and brings the business on track. Adopting new processes might not be easy but the failure to innovate and change is your businesses’ greatest enemy.

When should you consider BPR

The pandemic has caused shifts in the marketplace, necessitating the need to adopt new processes and completely doing away with the others. 

You know you need to restructure your business when processes are no longer serving their intended functions, processes are taking longer than usual, decrease in service value and when your revenue is significantly lower than the resources you are investing in your business.

However, a business reengineering process comes with challenges and it can actually fail. If you do not carefully analyse your business processes, you might end up adopting processes that are not necessary and getting rid of the ones that are beneficial to the success of your business. For a BPR to be successful, you need to have the right resources. These can include the right set of BPR tools, the skilled human resources and adequate budgeting/funding.

It is hard to tell whether the business environment will return to where it was but one thing we can be sure of is that certain processes need to change. A carefully planned and implemented business reengineered process can help you revamp your business and help you remain competitive amid uncertainty.

If you would like to get started on your reengineering journey, talk to us.