When most people talk about Six Sigma, they are thinking about the DMAIC methodology. Six Sigma provides a way of measuring the variability in a process as it delivers services to an end-user or customer. The essence of Six Sigma is found in the reality that business processes are inherently unpredictable. Focus on value-add and customer-focused processes.Willing participation and buy-in of all associates involved in the redesign.Prosci’s success factors directly map to tenants of Six Sigma: A successful BPR project can be more identified with the following success factors identified in Prosci’s study “1998-1999 Reengineering Best Practices:” In evaluating Hammer and Champy’s principles of BPR, one must note that BPR is not reorganizing, restructuring, downsizing, automation or cost-cutting – although these results are often part of a well thought-out, well planned, and well-executed reengineering project. Capture information once and at the source.Put the decision point where the work is performed, and build control into the process.Link parallel activities in the workflow instead of just integrating their results.Treat geographically dispersed resources as though they were centralized.Integrate information processing work into the real work that produces the information.Identify all the processes in an organization and prioritize them in order of redesign urgency.

They also outlined seven reengineering principles to streamline the work process and thereby achieve significant levels of improvement in quality, time management and cost: Hammer and Champy felt the design of workflow in most large corporations was based on no-longer-valid assumptions about technology, people and organizational goals. In the early 1990s, Michael Hammer and James Champy authored a best-selling book, Reengineering the Corporation, in which they promoted that sometimes radical redesign and reorganization of a process by wiping the slate clean was necessary to lower costs and increase quality of service. Through the years, there have been many different notions about what business process reengineering (BPR) is and how successful it has been as a process improvement approach.

Michael hammer james champy