What Is Business Process Reengineering?

Business process reengineering (or BPR) is a management strategy that focuses on the assessment and design of workflows and other business processes to either streamline and rationalize the way an organization’s employees perform their roles to improve how an organization achieves its goals. The aim of BPR is to reorder the way an organization conducts its business in order to improve customer satisfaction, manage operating costs, and to become competitive in the global arena.

BPR often involves a radical, organization-wide restructuring of its operations starting from the ground-floor and finishing in the executive suite. The idea of BPR was popularized in the 1990s by Thomas H. Davenport who posited the idea that any business process could be broken down into a set of logically related tasks that is used to achieve a given outcome. He argued for wholesale changes to business practices and the processes related to them to improve an organization’s function.