Business Process Re-engineering (BPR), a business management strategy pioneered in the early 1990s, focuses on fundamentally rethinking and radically redesigning an organization's workflows and processes from the ground up. Its primary goal is to achieve significant improvements in customer service, operational costs, and competitiveness, often leveraging technological innovations like automation.
Advocated by figures such as Thomas H. Davenport, BPR (also known as business process redesign or transformation) emphasizes a holistic, full-scale recreation of processes rather than incremental optimization. The approach begins with a high-level assessment of the organization's mission and customer needs, followed by a complete restructuring of core business processes for greater efficiency and effectiveness. While detailed process mapping can empower employees by revealing improvement opportunities, research, like a 2019 study by Huising, indicates it may also lead to alienation as the magnitude of systemic inefficiencies becomes visible, sometimes prompting managers to transition into external change-management roles.