Business Process Reengineering reminds us of a simple truth: if you automate a bad process, you get a faster bad process.
Michael Hammer’s work in Reengineering the Corporation challenged companies to rethink how work is done instead of adding technology on top of old habits. That idea is still relevant in today’s digital-transformation programs.
I have seen this directly. In one operation, aluminum profiles were managed through manual warehouse calculations. For small volumes, the weakness stayed hidden. At scale, with thousands of tons moving through the system, small calculation errors became expensive scrap and avoidable complexity.
The tempting answer would have been to automate the old workflow: create a software interface around the same flawed manual logic. That is often what companies do when digital transformation feels safer than process redesign.
Instead, the flow was re-engineered:
- Material input and output rules were clarified.
- Calculation logic was embedded into the system.
- Order handling was standardized.
- Manual interpretation was removed from the critical path.
The result was not just automation. It was structural change.
This is the uncomfortable reality: hidden inefficiencies often remain invisible until scale exposes them. Digital tools can make those inefficiencies faster, cleaner-looking, and harder to question.
Real transformation starts before the tool. It starts by challenging the process itself.