Business Process Reengineering is a discipline in which extensive research has been carried out and numerous methodologies churned out. But what seems to be lacking is a structured approach. The Business Process Reengineering method (BPR) is described by Hammer and Champy as 'the fundamental reconsideration and the radical redesign of organizational processes, in order to achieve drastic improvement of current performance in cost, services and speed'.

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. BPR advocates that enterprises go back to the basics and reexamine their very roots. It does not believe in small improvements. Rather it aims at total reinvention. As for results: BPR is clearly not for companies who want a 10% improvement. It is for the ones that need a ten-fold increase. BPR focuses on processes and not on tasks, jobs or people. It endeavors to redesign the strategic and value added processes that transcend organizational boundaries

Rather than organizing a firm into functional specialties (like production, accounting, marketing, etc.) and to look at the tasks that each function performs, Hammer and Champy recommend that we should look at complete processes; from materials acquisition, towards production, towards marketing and distribution. One should rebuild the firm into a series of processes.

Value creation for the customer is the leading factor for BPR and information technology often plays an important enabling role. The main proponents of reengineering were Michael Hammer and James Champy. In a series of books including Reengineering the Corporation, Reengineering Management, and The Agenda, they argue that far too much time is wasted, passing on tasks from one department to another. They claim that it is far more efficient to appoint a team who perform all the tasks in the process.

Michael Hammer and James Champy suggested seven principles of reengineering to streamline the work process and thereby achieve significant levels of improvement in quality, time management, and cost:

1.       Organize around outcomes, not tasks.

2.       Identify all the processes in an organization and prioritize them in order of redesign urgency.

3.       Integrate information processing work into the real work that produces the information.

4.       Treat geographically dispersed resources as though they were centralized.

5.       Link parallel activities in the workflow instead of just integrating their results.

6.       Put the decision point where the work is performed, and build control into the process.

7.       Capture information once and at the source.

Davenport (1992) prescribes a five-step approach to the Business Process Reengineering model:

1.      Develop the business vision and process objectives: The BPR method is driven by a business vision which implies specific business objectives such as cost reduction, time reduction, output quality improvement.

2.      Identify the business processes to be redesigned: most firms use the 'high-impact' approach which focuses on the most important processes or those that conflict most with the business vision. A lesser number of firms use the 'exhaustive approach' that attempts to identify all the processes within an organization and then prioritize them in order of redesign urgency.

3.      Understand and measure the existing processes: to avoid the repeating of old mistakes and to provide a baseline for future improvements.

4.       Identify IT levers: awareness of IT capabilities can and should influence BPR.

5.      Design and build a prototype of the new process: the actual design should not be viewed as the end of the BPR process. Rather, it should be viewed as a prototype, with successive iterations. The metaphor of prototype aligns the Business Process Reengineering approach with quick delivery of results, and the involvement and satisfaction of customers.