It is a revolutionary process that challenges all the old organizational structures, work flows, job descriptions, management procedures, controls, and organizational values and culture. It discards those that make businesses underperform and replaces them with more effective and efficient processes. In other words, BPR is a re-invention of business processes rather than an improvement or enhancement. Michael Hammer, the father of BPR, has set forth the following seven principles of re-engineering. Organize Around Processes and Outcomes, Not Tasks and Departments.
Many organizations divide up work among different people.
This approach, with numerous handoffs, results in errors and delays as documents wait for hours or days at each desktop to be processed. In a re-engineered system, one person is given the responsibility for an entire process. Each person's job is designed around an outcome, such as a finished component or a completed process, rather than one of the tasks necessary to produce the finished component or complete the process. Often this results in a company replacing functional departments, such as manufacturing and marketing, with interdisciplinary teams that concentrate on completing a particular business process. IBM Credit Corp. used to have five distinct steps in its credit-approval process.