Business Process Reengineering (BPR): A Strategic Approach to Organizational Transformation

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is a management approach that aims to redesign and optimize business processes within an organization. Its mission is to achieve significant improvements in critical areas such as cost, quality, service, and speed. A fundamental approach to redesigning business processes to get monumental improvements in critical performance measures is called Business process re-engineering. BPR challenges the core assumptions on which existing processes exist, thus, challenging incremental improvement methods. The primary goal of BPR is to help organizations fundamentally rethink how they deliver value to customers.

Core Principles of Successful BPR

Several key principles define successful business process re-engineering:

• Organize around outcomes, not tasks
• Have those who use the output perform the process
• Subsume information-processing work into the real work that produces the information
• Treat geographically dispersed resources as though they were centralized
• Link parallel activities instead of integrating their results
• Put the decision point where the work is performed
• Capture information once and at the source

What distinguishes BPR from other process improvement methods like Six Sigma or Lean is its scope and approach. While Six Sigma focuses on reducing variation and Lean emphasizes waste elimination, business process re-engineering takes a more holistic view. In practice, while Six Sigma and Lean are about doing things better, BPR is about doing better things – sometimes completely re-imagining how work should be done.

The BPR Center of Excellence (CoE)

The BPR Center of Excellence (CoE), located at Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD, is integral to our organization. As the primary service provider and source of expertise for BPR Services across the Army, they empower the Army enterprise to transform processes through innovative BPR. Specifically, the BPR CoE provides three core BPR services: Training, Advisory Support, and BPR Facilitation.

Service Offerings

• BPR Training Program: This program is designed to develop and certify BPR professionals that will lead their programs and commands to overcome Army business challenges through BPR. It consists of three tiers, Foundation, Intermediate, and Advanced, with each level building upon the previous one.
• Advisory Support: The team provides subject matter expertise, governance, technical assistance, and support through consultations on BPR projects facilitated outside of the BPR CoE team.
• BPR Facilitation: These services provide direct support to organizations across the Army enterprise to overcome challenges and deliver value. This includes providing expert assistance with BPR projects from capturing and analyzing the current state, to designing a more efficient and effective to-be process.

Training and Certification

Students who complete the full curriculum will achieve an Army BPR Professional Certification. To register for the BPR Foundation Training, please review the BPR Foundation Enrollment Instructions. Foundation is a prerequisite to the Virtual Instructor Lead (VILT) BPR Intermediate Course. The following table provides the schedule for upcoming training sessions:

To find out more about the services that the BPR CoE has to offer, please visit the BPR CoE milSuite site. Here you will find tools, templates, and techniques that are most used in successful BPR projects.