Business Process Re-Engineering

A major element of improving time-to-market and reducing costs is reengineering the product development process. DRM Associates can assist with re-engineering your business processes. We bring a sound methodology and, most importantly, the experience with practical approaches and strategies for improving business processes.

We offer the flexibility of two basic consulting approaches. The first approach is to go after the high-payoff opportunities quickly. This is done by organizing an experienced multi-functional process improvement team to brainstorm and implement improvements or organizing a larger group to use the “workout” approach popularized by GE. The savings from these high-payoff improvements can “fund” a more formal re-engineering project. Our more formal approach to business process reengineering is depicted below.

Our philosophy is to work through your personnel to achieve commitment to the changes. We would typically start by conducting a preliminary assessment to give us a basic understanding of the organization’s business processes and identify the areas of greatest opportunity. We would work with management to determine the scope of the processes to be re-engineered, develop a project plan, and identify project personnel. We would then conduct a brief workshop to introduce your process improvement teams to the business process re-engineering methodology and supporting documentation methodologies such as IDEF0. We can take responsibility for documenting and analyzing business processes or we can train company personnel to document and analyze business processes. We would suggest appropriate metrics and help to determine baseline process performance.

We can facilitate the teams identify process shortcomings and investigate fixes and improvements. We can suggest improvements and approaches based on our experience assisting other companies improve their business processes. We can 1.) serve as a sounding board for the teams to discuss their ideas, 2.) provide an objective viewpoint to mediate differences of opinion, 3.) insure the teams are not unnecessarily placing constraints on themselves, 4.) champion the improvements in the face of organizational resistance, and 5.) insure the teams are going far enough with their process re-engineering/improvement efforts. We can assist the teams develop an implementation plan, conduct training, implement the improvements, and monitor the results. The improved results through our assistance will pay for itself many times over.