[t]he 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. Re-engineering is part of what is necessary in the radical change of processes.[1]
The purpose of business process re-engineering is to help prepare the users for the new or modified automated system that is being developed. The focus is on understanding and documenting current processes and business needs, and identifying where automation may help. Then the focus shifts to assisting users to modify or use new processes that incorporate the use of the automated systemfunctionality. Training and measuring process effectiveness are important parts of the BPR effort.
The goals of BPR are to streamline existing processes, to ensure the correct processes are being automated (i.e. some processes do not need to be automated), and to ensure automation is addressing the process need. This does not mean the elimination of all manual processes. Some new processes may be a combination of manual and automated activities. In many cases, an organizational change or re-design may be part of the effort or it may be a simultaneous effort. [3]