The idea of business process reengineering is making a comeback, this time driven by artificial intelligence (AI).

In the 1990s, companies used enterprise resource planning systems and the internet to carry out business process reengineering (BPR) in order to bring about radical changes to broad end-to-end business processes. However, the implementation of such systems often failed to meet expectations.

Over the years, process management typically involved only incremental change to local processes. However, a new version of the idea is making a comeback, and as AI emerges as a universally applicable general-purpose technology, it appears possible that it can enable the kind of radical redesign of business processes envisaged by BPR’s proponents. (Harvard Business Review)

Today, the cost of implementing AI has dropped dramatically, and AI is already transforming a range of sectors including banking, insurance, industry, and health care. However, to take advantage of the potential benefits, companies need to bring back an end-to-end process perspective on their businesses and carefully consider how AI can transform them.

As AI inducts new capabilities into a business process, companies need to rethink it all – what tasks are essential, who will perform them, and in what sequence and frequency.

At its most basic level, process analysis often involves a mix of constraints and opportunities, and companies need to explore where they are generating sufficient data to extract patterns that could be used to support operational decisions.

Smart companies are viewing the introduction of AI as a catalyst for an end-to-end re-examination or revisualization of their business processes.

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