This video is part of Inteq Group's broader video series designed to give practitioners and business leaders deep insights into strategy, strategy execution, business process management, process reengineering, digital transformation, and business systems analysis. In this particular video, the focus is on one of the most common questions Inteq receives from clients and colleagues: When we talk about reengineering, what are the kinds of things we can actually do inside our organization?
To answer that question, three real-world BPR examples are presented - each very different from the others - to paint a broad picture of the possibilities.
Before diving into the examples, it helps to establish a key distinction: Business Process Management (BPM) versus Business Process Reengineering (BPR).
Think of Business Process Management as an overarching umbrella for all things business process related - a very big tent. Under that tent you have incremental business process improvement, process reengineering, digital transformation, robotic process automation, and everything else in the process space.
This video focuses specifically on transformational business process reengineering - not incremental improvement.
Most organizations are doing some level of ongoing incremental process improvement all day, every day. That's a good thing, and its value should not be diminished. But transformational reengineering is different. It is:
Incremental improvement operates within the current model to make things a little better. Reengineering changes that model to adapt the organization to the future.
When thinking about what reengineering is trying to accomplish, Inteq uses a framework called EESA - four components that define the goals of any BPR initiative:
Effectiveness - Creating customer and business value. This includes the quality of outputs and work products, how the organization engages customers, service levels, timeliness, and related factors. It's fundamentally about value creation.
Efficiency - Delivering those high levels of effectiveness in the most economical manner possible.
Scalability - Building an underlying operational process platform that can support significant revenue growth - 20%, 50%, 100%, even 200% - without a proportional increase in staffing. The goal is to grow rapidly, grow big, while adding staff only incrementally rather than linearly.
Agility - The organization's ability to rapidly recognize and adapt to changes in its business environment: shifts in the economy, evolving customer requirements, competitive pressures, and other external forces.
This example comes from a rapidly growing high-tech company - though the dynamics apply to virtually any organization. The company had a continuous, pressing need to source, recruit, and onboard talent to keep pace with its growth trajectory. The challenge was multifaceted:
Three parallel initiatives were executed simultaneously:
The entire effort took approximately six to eight months - a compressed timeline for this level of transformation. The outcome was a fundamental shift in the organization's ability to onboard and retain excellent candidates. The recruiting-to-onboarding cycle was reduced from 8–12 weeks to approximately 8–10 days - a dramatic improvement in both speed and candidate retention.
This example involves an insurance organization with a traditional, highly manual claims processing operation - intake, adjudication, and payment. The process for this particular product line was entirely conventional:
The core problem: this product line had a very high volume of claims at very low dollar amounts. The cost of processing each claim, relative to the claim value, was disproportionately high. In order to maintain the right level of gross profit, the cost of adjudication needed to come down significantly.
The operation was spread across multiple systems, multiple roles, and multiple departments - a classic siloed model.
This process was an ideal candidate for Robotic Process Automation (RPA). It checked every box on the RPA criteria list:
In parallel with implementing the RPA solution, a modest IT modernization effort was undertaken - just enough to accommodate the new automated workflows.
Approximately 90% of claims were fully automated end-to-end - from intake through adjudication through payment processing, lights out. The remaining 10% required some manual intervention, typically because they fell outside certain size or complexity thresholds. The cost per claim dropped dramatically, making the entire product line economically viable to continue and scale.
This organization had acquired three additional companies, each similar in kind to the acquiring organization and similar to each other. The result was four like-kind organizations operating independently.
The strategic objective was to capture the true value of those acquisitions - which requires consolidating processes and systems, not running the same underlying work in four different silos.
Inteq Group looked across all four organizations - the acquiring company plus the three acquisitions - and evaluated best practices for each business process. Importantly, this organization was not holding on to the old way of doing things. They were not mandating that the acquired companies simply conform to the acquirer's existing model. They were genuinely looking for the best solution across all four organizations.
One of the acquired companies was smaller but had particularly high-performing processes and outstanding supporting systems. A significant portion of the new common operating model was drawn from that organization.
A key principle that made this work was what can be described as global optimization with recognized local variants:
A single cohesive organizational operating model was created. Each brand maintained its own identity and customer-facing presence, but behind the scenes, all four operated on a common process platform - one that was highly effective, highly efficient, highly scalable, and highly agile.
BPR almost always includes incremental improvement. While the strategic focus is on transformational initiatives, the analysis process will surface many opportunities for low-tech, no-tech incremental process improvements. These provide near-term relief and should not be ignored.
BPR almost always requires some level of IT modernization. The degree will vary - sometimes significant, sometimes modest - but transformational process initiatives generally require upgrading or modernizing supporting applications and technologies to accommodate the new model.
BPR is a journey with an endpoint. Ongoing incremental improvement is continuous, but process reengineering has a defined horizon - six months, twelve months, eighteen months. The reengineering effort is aligned to the organizational strategy, initiatives are identified and implemented, and the organization moves into the new space. A few years later, when strategy evolves again, another reengineering cycle may follow.
The key thing is to get started. Strategy has to be analyzed, translated into strategic initiatives, brought down to the business process layer, and aligned with the right technology. That work takes time. The sooner it begins, the sooner the organization wins the future.
Inteq Group offers a full suite of training courses and management consulting services in business process management, business process reengineering, business systems analysis, robotic process automation, intelligent automation with AI, digital transformation, and change management. To explore Inteq's training course catalog or management consulting services, visit inteqgroup.com.
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Related Posts:
What is Business Process Reengineering?
10 Strategic Inflection Points that Require Transformational BPR
Digital Transformation vs. Business Process Reengineering (BPR)