X.7 Business Process Re-engineering

🔧 (e) Business Process Re-engineering (BPR)

• 📖 Definition (Hammer & Champy): the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of processes to achieve dramatic improvements in cost, quality, service & speed.
• 🗣️ In simple words: don't just tweak the old process — rethink and redesign the process around public-service outcomes while preserving legal safeguards.
  • Example: instead of a passport needing 8 visits, re-engineer it into a single online + one-visit flow.

Deeper understanding — redesign the process around the service

BPR examines the whole process rather than merely automating existing steps. Hammer's foundational article challenges automation of inefficient work. Original article listing.

Original method: map the citizen's journey → identify delay, repeated data entry and rework → distinguish legal safeguards from obsolete routines → design a simpler end-to-end process → assign a process owner → pilot and evaluate → train staff and update rules.

Illustrative licence redesign: one application captures necessary information once; agencies verify records through authorised interfaces; routine cases follow clear rules; exceptions receive reasoned review; applicants can track progress and appeal. This is a proposed design, not a claim about an existing Pakistan service.

Measure: total elapsed time, visits, user cost, errors, exclusion, complaint resolution and staff workload. Moving delay from a counter to an unseen online queue is not improvement.

BPR versus continuous improvement: radical redesign questions the basic process; continuous improvement makes repeated smaller changes. Either may be appropriate.

Public-sector limits: preserve lawful hearings, records, privacy, accessibility and separation of incompatible duties. “Start from scratch” is a design challenge, not permission to discard legal obligations.

Practice conclusion: successful BPR changes the process and its management, with technology serving the redesigned service.