Excerpted from: Michael Hammer & James Champy, "Reengineering the Corporation - A Manifesto for Business Revolution", Nicholas Brealy Publishing, London, 1993, pp 31-32.
When someone asks us for a quick definition of business reengineering, we say that it means "starting over." It doesn't mean tinkering with what already exists or making incremental changes that leave basic structures intact. It isn't about making patchwork fixes -- jury-rigging existing systems so that they work better. It does mean abandoning long-established procedures and looking afresh at the work required to create a company's product or service and deliver value to the customer. It means asking this question: If I were re-creating this company today, given what I know and given current technology, what would it look like?" Reengineering a company means tossing aside old systems and starting over. It involves going back to the beginning and inventing a better way of doing work.
This informal definition is fine for conversation, because it gives people an idea of what we mean by business reengineering. But anyone who wants to apply reengineering to a company needs something more.
How does a company reengineer its business processes? Where does it begin? Who gets involved? Where do the ideas for radical change come from?
We have watched companies use trial and error to answer these questions about radical change. We have served as advisors to companies that have made such changes and observed others. Out of their experiences and our own emerged the concept of business reengineering, which we have developed into a process for reinventing a company. To perform this process, we and the companies with which we have worked have developed a body of techniques. These are not formulas, but tools that companies can use to reinvent the way their work gets done.
Our experiences and those of our clients with these techniques are encouraging. Used properly--that is, with intelligence and imagination--they work and can lead to breathtaking improvements in performance. The balance of this book is about business reengineering and how people can make it succeed in their companies.
Let's begin, then, with a better definition. "Reengineering," properly, is "the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and speed."