Business Process Reengineering (BPR) reminds us of a simple truth: If you automate a bad process, you just get a faster bad process. Michael Hammer, in his landmark book Reengineering the Corporation, pushed companies to fundamentally rethink how work gets done instead of just layering technology on top of existing habits. He argued that real improvement comes from redesigning processes from the ground up.

I’ve seen this firsthand. In one of our operations, we managed aluminum profiles with a warehouse team manually calculating how many profile lengths were needed for each order. When you’re handling small numbers, the damage stays hidden. But once you scale to 2,500 tons, the margin of error becomes a financial disaster. The waste wasn’t just inefficiency—it was millions of dollars in scrap. And like in many businesses, the final customer unknowingly paid for the chaos.

We could have simply automated the old workflow—built a shiny software interface on top of the same flawed manual logic. That’s what most companies do under the banner of “digital transformation” because it’s less threatening and doesn’t challenge how people work.

But instead, we re-engineered the entire flow:

• Defined material input and output rules clearly
• Embedded calculation logic into the system
• Standardized order handling
• Eliminated manual interpretation altogether

The result wasn’t just automation—it was structural change. And it saved real money, sustainably.

Here’s the uncomfortable reality: Every company I’ve worked with has suffered from the same issue—hidden, scaled inefficiencies that no one sees until they become massive. People get excited about “digital transformation” because it sounds modern and harmless. But transformation without process redesign is just decoration.

Hammer’s message is still relevant today:

“Don’t pave the cow path.”

If you want real value, you must challenge the process itself—not just digitize the mess.