When a business grows and adapts it often requires a lot of overhauls, both physically and digitally. Processes that previously worked or were effective for purpose are no longer so. Because of this a business will re-engineer part of its business processes to adapt.

Reasons Why a Business May Adapt its Processes

A business may change the way it functions for many reasons,

• The business is expanding and it’s old process needs to handle the additional capacity or machinery.
• The function the old system used to serve has been superseded or removed from the business process as it is no longer required.
• The business is being merged or acquired by another and duplicate processes need to be removed or increased and vice versa.
• The process currently being used is not dynamic enough to be useful anymore or is causing issues.
• A process is failing or is not always effective.
• The current process has too many avoidable errors.

Reasons Why a Process May Need Changing

A business may change it’s processes for many reasons, such as ; –

• Improve the speed of operation.
• Improve the customization or dynamic of a process.
• Improve the continuity or compatibility to connect the process to other processes.
• As a reaction to changing legislation, laws or consumer complaints.
• Improve the efficiency of a process.
• Improve the operating cost of a process.
• Improve the output or capacity of a process.
• Improve the working capital investment in a process.
• Improve quality of a product.
  
• Change the product.

Re-engineering a process not only requires identifying a change but enacting that change can take a lot of steps to complete, especially for products in areas that are heavily reliant on compliance and conformity, such as electrical appliances or medial tools.

Improving Efficiency Caveats

Changing a business process can be risky and should have appropriate risk analysis in place where processes are crucial to the business process or jobs.

Many businesses re-engineer their processes simply to ensure that their product or products match demand. Overhauling business processes may not be financially viable if the number of defects or failing products outweighs the cost of replacing the machinery or software process.

Improving the speed of a process may make the process faster but the business may also want to change the system implemented, such as using a batch process system where the job can be completed as part of a ‘batch’. Having many batches however can lead to greater working capital on complex components or products and can mean that if there is a problem with one then it is likely that the whole batch is also going to fail. Batch processing can also make quality control and quality assurance much harder and more expensive to enact.