The reengineering revolution was poised to take off when Michael Hammer wrote a book with that title in 1995. It sputtered. Organizations had little time and even less desire to dump their processes and start over on blank sheets of paper.

The revolution was too daunting, but the ideas behind it remain valid. I was reminded of this as I was reading the book, Rethink: A Business Manifesto for Cutting Costs and Boosting Innovation, by Ric Merrifield (FT Press, 2009). He notes that seeking advice from people who actually do the work “tends to be more confusing than helpful. That’s because employees and managers…think of their jobs in terms of how they do them rather than what they are intended to accomplish.”

It’s always a good thing to involve the people working a process in improving that process, but you have to be careful not to lose sight of what that process is intended to accomplish. In Baldrige terms, that means being clear about whom the process serves and what the customers of that process require. It also means systematically evaluating key processes to identify opportunities for reengineering.

That’s one of the great benefits of a Lean kaizen event: Fresh eyes tear apart a process that has been running the same way for years and design a new process that is better and faster. And it takes less than a week.

The Baldrige Criteria ask: “How do you design and innovate your work processes to meet all the key requirements?” Some form of reengineering, whether through Lean or Six Sigma or PDCA, is the answer. It goes beyond the regular process improvements—which are also important—to the very reason the process exists.

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