BCAS Vice President CA Chirag Doshi’s Message for the Month of November 2022

ReEngineer or Retire

The post covid impact, the way the world money is getting invested in Indian businesses these days, increasing competition, pressure on financial performance and new market opportunities; all factors suggest that it’s time for Reengineering the organisational systems and processes.

Additionally increasing competitiveness, timeliness of servicing, improving quality requirements, technology evolution and many other factors have resulted in the Chartered Accountants offices becoming more and more process driven.

Given the current business era, process reengineering is a crucial element in the agenda of many large as well as small companies, including young start-ups looking for Investments.

Business process reengineering (BPR) is a methodology adopted to improve enterprise performance by increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of processes and reducing the costs that exist across the divisions. It also involves the redesigning of organizational structures.

The Key components of BPR are:

• Organization structure
• Systems and Process
• Strategies and Vision
• Culture

BPR implementation includes three phases:

Analysis phase -> Design phase -> Implementation phase

• Analysis phase: Analyse the customer requirements, analyse the current processes and designs and review the controls.
• Design phase: Based on reengineering principles plot the new design of operational and financial processes
• Implementation phase: plan the implementation, execute the initial changes and mange smooth transition

Benefits of Business Process Reengineering:

• Helps organisations achieve radical changes in their performance as measured by its cost, production cycle and service quality
• Helps streamline operations through simpler, leaner, and more productive processes by removing duplications and complications in the processes
• Lead to revolutionize the organisation’s thinking by migrating from conventional approaches to problem-solving approaches and to “think big”
• Transforms from a rule-driven and job-centred organisation structure to a value-creating organisation structure
• Helps build a strong enterprise risk management structure with improved controls to mitigate the risk faced by the organisation
• Jobs redesigning and allocation of job responsibilities, improving employee skills through various training programs

Principles of Business Process Reengineering:

• Be outcome oriented and not task oriented
• Prioritize processes in order of redesign urgency
•  Integrate information processing work into the work that produces the information
• Treat the resources which are geographically dispersed as though they are centralized
• Implement strong controls at the decision point and where the work is performed
• Information should be captured at the source

Steps to be followed in Business Process Reengineering:

Step 1: Prepare the vision statements and business goals
Step 2: Identify a team with appropriate capabilities
Step 3: identify and understand the current critical processes
Step 4: Reengineer the process and implement them
Step 5: Monitoring the new process

As the compliance requirements increase so as the cost of compliance and non-compliance increases, Professionals must find more innovative ways to increase the overall process efficiency. The technology could play a key role in in-creasing the efficiency of various processes.

Finance professionals will have to move from a mere scorekeeper to partner with the business and the operations. A thorough review of various operational and financial processes of an organisation will reveal a number of factors triggering need for a re-engineering of the conventional and traditional processes.

‘Key to achieving the reengineering starts with forming an integrated performance framework through Integrated Business Planning’