“A business process is a collection of activities that takes one or more kinds of input and creates an output that is of value to the customer. A business process has a goal and is affected by events occurring in the external world or in other processes.”
“A process perspective sees not individual tasks in isolation, but the entire collection of tasks that contribute to a desired outcome. Narrow points of view are useless in a process context.”
“A successful career will no longer be about promotion. It will be about mastery.”
“Automating a mess yields an automated mess.”
“Business reengineering isn’t about fixing anything. Business reengineering means starting all over, starting from scratch.”
“Capture information once and at the source.”
“Have those who use the output of the process perform the process.”
“Heavy investments in information technology have delivered disappointing results – largely because companies tend to use technology to mechanize old ways of doing business”
“How people and companies did things yesterday doesn’t matter to the business reengineer.”
“If managing were simple, why do the majority of businesses fail?”
“In reengineering, managers break loose from outmoded business processes and the design principles underlying them and create new ones. “
“Information technology offers many options for reorganizing work. But our imaginations must guide our decisions about technology – not the other way around.”
“Instead of embedding outdated processes in silicon and software, we should obliterate them and start over.”
“Link parallel activities instead of integrating their results.”
“Only if top-level managers back the effort and outlast the company cynics will people take reengineering seriously.”
“Organize around outcomes, not tasks.”
“Process work requires that everyone involved be directed toward a common goal; otherwise, conflicting objectives and parochial agendas impair the effort.”
“Put the decision point where the work is performed, and build control into the process.”
“Reengineering cannot be entrusted to the semi-competent, the hangers-on with nothing better to do.”
“Reengineering eliminates work, not jobs or people.”
“Reengineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed.”
“Reengineering posits a radical new principle: that the design of work must be based not on hierarchical management and the specialization of labor but on end-to-end processes and the creation of value for the customer.”
“Reengineering requires looking at the fundamental processes of the business from a cross-functional perspective.”
“Subsume information-processing work into the real work that produces the information.”
“The reengineering team must keep asking Why? and What if?”
“Treat geographically dispersed resources as though they were centralized.”
“We cannot achieve breakthroughs in performance by cutting fat or automating existing processes. Rather, we must challenge old assumptions and shed the old rules that made the business underperform in the first place.”