Towards an Agile Approach for Business Process Reengineering

Abstract

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is a popular business management approach that provides organizations with a roadmap to efficiently achieve their operational objectives by redesigning and improving their business processes. Once successfully implemented, BPR allows organizations to increase their productivity while providing better service quality, improving customer satisfaction and reducing costs. Unfortunately, a large number of BPR implementation projects fail or do not fully achieve their goals. One of the main causes for this pointed out in the literature is the rigidity of the method at the heart of the conventional BPM approach. The present work proposes a new agile-based BPR approach called SAPRA (Spiral Agile Process Reengineering Approach) that can help organizations increase the success rate of their BPR initiatives. The proposed approach is based on two iterative and incremental spiral cycles; a macro-cycle that applies main BPR phases in a spiral manner and a micro-cycle that focuses on the optimization of the business processes performance using BPM (Business Process Management). The micro-cycle ends when the macro-cycle objectives are achieved.