Back To Glossary

Business Process Design or Redesign

What is business process design?

The act of designing a new process or workflow from the ground up is known as business process design (BPD). The objective of BPD is to develop effective processes and workflows that are scalable and easy to replicate for any business and meet a company's goals.

What is business process redesign?

The redesign of a business process involves enhancing an existing process to ensure it aligns with the new goals and objectives of a company.

People go thorough revamp of a company's major business processes with the goal of making a quantum leap in performance measurements such as return on investment (ROI), cost reduction, and service quality enhancement, capture more data points, etc. This exercise is referred to as business process redesign.

Benefits of business process design and redesign

Properly designing any business process helps every team member to be aware of the objectives, exact steps and tasks for a workflow. Also, it helps the whole company in the following ways -

Standardizing any work

Business process design ensures the elimination of any guesswork by standardizing business processes in the company. It becomes easy for team members to follow the defined steps, resulting in fewer mistakes, increased productivity and safety, and reduced costs.

Increased organizational visibility

Quality business process design helps all members in easy access information and track progress toward goals. Top-level people ( CEOs, CXOs, team leads) can make informed business decisions quickly, and implement necessary changes to close gaps in performance with this structured information captured in every step of any business process. 

Good understanding of the overall business strategy 

Doing a proper process design and showing the same to the team before starting execution, helps all the involved members in reaching an optimum understanding of the strategy. It also allows the team leads to improve the business process by redesigning it beforehand and thus creating an effective business process design.

Preserving company knowledge

Business process design creates a common language and methodology for communicating guidelines and procedures. The documentation of each task will transfer and preserve company knowledge. When designing new processes, be sure to automate approvals and updates so stakeholders never miss a deadline. 

Clarity on the automation areas

Visually making a business process design provides clarity and it helps a lot in understanding where automation is required in the process flow.

Brings clarity in the integrations

Effective business process design ensures that a new process goes with existing workflows, and software. During the design process, it makes clear how different processes impact each other and how making integrations in different parts of the process can make the flow of information better across different apps and processes.

When business process design exercise takes place?

1. Starting a new process from scratch: For entirely new work or when a new department is starting, people ideally create a new process and it is designed to cater to the totally new need of the company.
2. Improving an existing process: When there is an effective process already in place but the need arises to implement new compliance, a problem is identified and it needs to be solved by making necessary changes to get the desired result.
   Many businesses undergo business process redesigns as a result of industry developments that necessitate new infrastructure to be competitive. In other situations, businesses may be forced to undertake drastic changes, such as abandoning old procedures and replacing them with new ones.
3. Introducing a new ad hoc process: When the team handling a process after some time starts feeling a requirement to create a process/workflow linked to the existing process which might help them to handle it better. Also, when the team receives ad hoc requests from other departments which are not organized or included in the existing process, creating bottlenecks and confusion among the team.

Steps of a business process design

1. Identifying the need for a process
2. Process mapping
3. Understanding conditions for stage transitions
4. Understanding process automation possibilities

Business process design has a direct impact on your bottom line and your company’s success.

Designing a brand-new business process is an opportunity to involve stakeholders across business units, promote an understanding of overall business goals and objectives, and create a roadmap for success with efficient workflows.