Business process management (BPM) is one of the types of modern-day software initiatives involving business process software. Business process re-engineering (BPR) is a business process software that had also been very popular in the 1990s. Business process re-engineering and business process management have the same goals for achieving organizational efficiency and effectiveness, but each is a differing approach that has merits of its own.
There are many things that separate the two, even though they are approaches to business workflow improvement that share some similarities. While some may look at these as rival approaches to the same goal, there’s another option: using them both in their specific capacities to enhance your business workflows. But first, you’ll have to understand both in a more intimate way. So what exactly are the similarities — and differences — between BPM and BPR?
Similarities & Differences
BPM and BPR processes each consist of several steps, and each approach to process improvement is geared toward greater productivity — by improving individual factors like speed and quality within the processes present. These approaches also aim to reduce expenses, and their necessary steps include evaluation and analysis of the metrics.
While BPR encourages redesigning the structure and flow of a business process for strategic purposes, what we see with BPM is a disciplined, managerial approach that focuses on maintaining the current design of a process in order to reinforce it. BPM as a whole is the general business practice that’s generally accepted now as the backbone of any workflow, relying especially on its interactions with HR and IT more than anything. Meanwhile, BPR manages to improve business processes instead through circumstantial collaboration with any and all departments, transcending organizational boundaries and redesigning the process itself as needed to suit the goals of the approach.
With all this in mind, it might seem to some that the two approaches are counterintuitive — and in some cases, that’s correct. However, there are things that each has to offer which can prove to be of substantial benefit to any workflow.
Benefits of BPM
Business process management focuses on procedure, and retains a process as it is; as such, it shows a significant reliance on automation tools to reduce redundancies. When this is done right, it means that other things can become the focus of the process — including lowering expenses such as cost and effort. This type of optimization is obviously desirable for anyone trying to manage multiple processes, and businesses often opt for an approach that emphasizes this. Another benefit of BPM is the fact that the customer experience is more central to the overall improvements being made to the process in kind.
Benefits of BPR
The idea behind BPR is that reconstruction of the process can benefit the output of the workflow — and given that output is the main focus, BPR generally provides higher quality production overall. It also has the added benefit of discerning and ultimately eliminating redundancies, given that these are actually a source of lowered quality. BPR’s focus on quality requires such elimination, and overall the goals of the improvement are met through this internal restructuring rather than through tools that enhance the existing structure.
Challenges
Within BPR’s approach is a general understanding that expenses will increase — proving to be much higher than those of a BPM approach. That’s because business process software helps to reduce regular costs, while BPR is intended to eventually reduce expenditure in the long term. However, while traditional BPM makes processes less costly in general with things like automation in place, the overall quality of the process output is reduced by the approach’s inability to diminish redundancies or time-consuming tasks — instead allowing it to exist by automating such tasks instead. This can result in wasted time and resources over long periods, which obviously can affect not just the cost and such, but the business process as well.
A New Approach
The technological advantages of automation can’t be ignored, and given that fact, BPM has proven the more influential and productive approach in recent years. It’s obvious that this can create a more modernized business process — however, the way that output is benefited by a strategic and intimate restructure as is performed in BPR approaches makes for an inarguable boon. A generation of new approaches to improvement in any business process should be considered by allowing automation to be the guiding force in providing lean and cost-efficient operations, while still eliminating redundancy and restructuring business processes where possible to reduce the number of places where automation is needed, among other things.
By using the general goals of BPR in such a new combined approach, you can begin to look out for ways to increase the quality of your business’s output. By also implementing the tenets of continuous improvement that are present in traditional BPM, you can make for a leaner operation while ensuring the absolute best in customer service.
Conclusion
Each way you look at business processes has insights to glean, and as you continue to evolve your own approach, you’ll see the additional merits of BPR, BPM, and others to boot. The catch is that in a time when everything changes so rapidly in the business world, certain approaches need to become adaptable. As you take on new approaches to process improvement and the like, you might even find other options to approaches that help to eliminate waste, increase productivity, and meet the needs of your customers in a way that’s better than ever.
