How to Rethink Business Process Reengineering with Process Simulation
Business Process Reengineering (BPR), also known as Business Process Redesign, entered the business world as a hero of the 1990s.
It was Michael Hammer’s (an American engineer, management author, and a professor of computer science) answer to the problem of poorly performing processes, which at the time, were being blindly automated by new technology.
What Is Business Process Reengineering and the Challenge of Automation
Business Process Reengineering is the act of fundamentally changing a core business process to realize significant cost savings, increase production output, or drastically improve a product or service offering.
But excitement over new technology of the 90s, such as digitized databases, automation software, and the World Wide Web pushed business leaders into an automation frenzy.
Hyperautomation went into overdrive.
Rather than questioning how a process or stages of a process created value, businesses were automating processes left and right with little regard for outcomes.
Businesses formed two camps — Camp Automate and Camp Obliterate.
Camp Automate: take advantage of new automation technology that previously did not exist to speed up and, thus, improve process performance. This camp worked in incremental, but exciting, improvements.
Camp Obliterate: don’t use new technology as a patchwork solution to deeper process problems. Instead, obliterate poorly performing processes entirely and seek dramatic reform through Business Process Reengineering methodology. This camp worked in quantum leaps.
Minit positions itself as a bridge between the two perspectives, offering BPR advocates an opportunity to take advantage of automation technology like Robotic Process Automation (RPA), while also using Process Mining to address root cause problems of broken processes.
Process Analysis and Process Simulation As 2 Essential Steps of BPR
Business process reengineering is an approach that completely rethinks how things work. Minit helps to move your BPR strategy beyond creative thinking and grounds redesign concepts in data in two ways:
- Process analysis — mine and analyze process data to reveal as-is process workflows and give process architects a solid foundation on which to stand.
- Process simulation — simulate proposed changes to the original business process with real business data to explore the feasibility and reveal unintended consequences of such actions, before executing them in real life.
By adding these two data-driven layers to your BPR cycle, decision-makers are able to mitigate the risk involved with the traditional “start from scratch” approach to business process redesign.
See Change Impact on Processes Before Going Live with Your BPR Initiative
BPR involves a large number of variables and interrelated consequences of change actions.
For example, RPA may be deployed in your operations to reduce output process time. However, such a move may simply shift a bottleneck to the next task in the process. So, how can a process architect decide the next change?
Business process simulation is the answer, offering a massive opportunity for play, while also creating a safe, virtual space for measured change.
Minit Process Mining software allows you to create a custom set of variables affecting proposed changes, such as resources dedicated to a task, man-hour rate, distribution of process starts, task duration, working hours and days, and more. By applying assumed changes in a virtual setting, with real business data, you are able to discover which optimized proposals return the best results.
Moreover, all the typical visualization models are available in the simulation space. This means proposed decisions can be benchmarked and visually manipulated as BPMN diagrams.
Rethink Business Process Reengineering with Minit Process Mining
Process Mining catapults the incremental and measured approach to traditional Business Process Management with the big and bold call to actions of BPR. It’s all about data, and the simulations you can render with such data.
If you’ve got data, just use it. Yes, reengineering a corporation takes charisma, vision, and passion, but smart reengineering takes data.
In comparison to traditional Business Process Reengineering tools, Minit Process Mining can hit two birds with one stone and thus deliver the process transparency as well as predict the outcome of the BPR project.
Want to see how Process Simulation in action? Watch the Process Simulation Webinar here
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The article was originally published on the Minit.io blog.
