Business Process Improvement

Business process improvement was revolutionized when Dr. Michael Hammer introduced the international best-seller Reengineering the Corporation. Dr. Hammer’s research and teachings focus on how to transform business operations; his work is relentlessly pragmatic and immediately applicable.

But what are business processes?

"Process simply means end-to-end work, as opposed to piecemeal, activity-level work. Focusing on processes, as opposed to tasks, is a fundamental change in how we regard work. Improving the productivity of individual tasks is of course a useful thing to do, but no longer represents a major opportunity for organizations seeking to improve performance. The real problems in contemporary operations are not found in individual tasks themselves but in how tasks are combined together to create whole processes."

BOTTOMLINE: Companies that concentrate on their processes by designing them, measuring them, managing them, and constantly improving them are able to achieve sustained high levels of operating performance.