Reimagining BPR for Nepal’s Next Decade
The day was bright outside, but inside the boardroom the air felt dim, thick with unspoken worries; the room had its usual trappings of authority; long table, leather chairs, flickering projector. Yet, it carried the mood of a place waiting for answers that never came. The boardroom was hushed, though not with focus. Charts projected on the wall told a story that everyone in the room already knew but no one wanted to voice aloud: revenues stagnant, costs creeping upward, competitors growing leaner, faster. Around the polished table, managers exchanged cautious glances, each aware that the very processes keeping the company afloat were also anchoring it to mediocrity. It was a familiar scene across Nepal’s corporate landscape; business leaders striving harder, yet sensing that effort alone was no longer enough. The rules of competition had changed, but the playbook had not.
When Old Recipes Fail
The truth is organisational processes; the routines and flows by which work gets done, are much like the rituals of a kitchen at home. In many Nepali households, the rhythm of cooking follows inherited steps: the way vegetables are chopped, spices layered, or rice measured, washed, and steamed. These methods, passed down from one generation to the next, bring comfort and predictability. Yet anyone who has tried to prepare a traditional meal during an unexpected festival rush knows that habits alone cannot meet new demands. To serve a feast for twenty when one is used to cooking for five, something more radical is required: rearranging the order of steps, rethinking utensils, sometimes even questioning the recipe itself.
In much the same way, companies cannot rely solely on inherited business routines when markets shift, customer culture changes, customer expectations rise, and digital technologies redraw the map of competition. Tinkering at the edges, automating here, digitising there may feel like progress, but often it is the equivalent of stirring the same old pot with a shinier ladle. What is needed is not minor adjustment, but rethinking from the ground up: a reimagining of how value is created and delivered. This is the essence of Business Process Re-engineering (BPR); a concept born three decades ago in the West, but one that resonates with striking relevance for Nepal’s present business moment.
Like the kitchen that must reimagine its workflow to serve a larger feast, organisations today face the demand to reexamine how work is conceived, sequenced, and performed. The difference is that in corporate Nepal, the stakes are far greater than delayed meals; they are about survival in volatile markets, relevance in the eyes of customers, and the capacity to transform before disruption dictates the terms.
The Rise, Promise, and Pitfalls of BPR
The idea and rebuilding the very architecture of the BPR did not emerge quietly. In 1990, Michael Hammer’s famous article in Harvard Business Review carried the provocative title: Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate (Hammer, 1990). In it, Hammer challenged executives to abandon the habit of computerising inefficient routines and instead question whether those routines should exist at all. The call was radical; do not simply modernise processes; obliterate and reinvent them. Three years later, Hammer, together with James Champy, amplified this idea in their bestselling book ‘Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution’ (Hammer & Champy, 1993), which quickly became required reading in boardrooms around the world. Their promise was bold and electrifying: dramatic leaps in performance, not incremental gains; tenfold improvements in cost, speed, quality, and service, not marginal percentages.
The allure of this new managerial philosophy was undeniable. Executives fatigued by years of incremental efficiency programmes seized on the manifesto. Early success stories became legends in corporate circles. Ford Motor Company, for instance, reduced its accounts payable staff by 75% simply by rethinking how information flowed between purchasing and finance, rather than automating old paper forms (Hammer & Champy, 1993). Mutual Benefit Life Insurance cut policy issuance turnaround from weeks to hours by redesigning its process from scratch. These examples dazzled leaders who saw in reengineering not just improvement, but revolution.
Yet, even in its earliest years, there were voices of caution. Thomas Davenport, in ‘Process Innovation: Reengineering Work through Information Technology’, emphasised that while information technology could enable radical redesign, it was only one part of the equation; success depended equally on organisational structures and people (Davenport, 1993). Together with James Short, Davenport had already highlighted in ‘MIT Sloan Management Review’ that business process redesign required a deeper marriage of technology, process thinking, and management commitment (Davenport & Short, 1990).
By the mid-1990s, reengineering had become a global phenomenon. Leading consulting firms such as McKinsey, Bain, and BCG produced playbooks promising clients breakthrough results through BPR. But the meteoric rise of reengineering was followed by a sobering reality check. Studies across industries estimated that as many as 60% to 70% of BPR initiatives failed to deliver their intended results (Hammer & Champy, 1993; Davenport, 1995). The reasons were remarkably consistent: leaders underestimated cultural resistance, ignored the human element, and focused too heavily on process charts and software rollouts. Davenport (1995), in his essay ‘Reengineering: The Fad That Forgot People’, captured the disillusionment sharply, arguing that the movement became synonymous with layoffs, disruption, and organisational fatigue rather than empowerment and renewal.
What began as a manifesto for revolution soon turned into a cautionary tale. Yet, the intellectual spark of BPR; the insistence on questioning fundamental assumptions about how work is organised, never truly disappeared. Instead, it waited for a new era of technologies and managerial wisdom to re-emerge in more balanced and sustainable forms.
Demystifying BPR: What Leaders Must Know
To move beyond the legends and the failures, it is worth pausing to demystify BPR itself; what it is, when it is required, and how its symptoms quietly appear in the life of an organisation before leaders even notice. Business Process Reengineering is not a tidy kaizen event or an IT upgrade with new screens and dashboards. It is the strategic act of rethinking how value is created endtoend, then redesigning, the work; often from a clean slate, to achieve orderofmagnitude improvements in cost, speed, quality, and experience (Hammer, 1990; Hammer & Champy, 1993). If continuous improvement is adjusting the flame under the pot, BPR is questioning the recipe, the sequence, the utensils, and the very kitchen layout; because the family and guests to be served has changed. In corporate terms, BPR belongs on the table when strategy has shifted, markets have moved, or digital customers now demand a journey the old process cannot deliver without contortions (Davenport & Short, 1990; Davenport, 1993).
Leaders recognise the conditions for BPR when execution keeps fighting strategy. A bank launches a growth agenda in SME lending, yet onboarding crawls because KYC checks are split across three systems and four departments. A fastmoving consumer goods company promises nextday delivery nationwide, but ordertocash still depends on spreadsheets and manual reconciliations at the distributor. A manufacturer invests in an ERP, yet procurement lead times swing wildly because engineering changes, vendor approvals, and GRN (Good Received Note) posting don’t speak to one another. These are not mere efficiency gaps; they are architecture problems, signalling, the process design no longer fits the ambition (Davenport & Short, 1990).
Symptoms that BPR, not just incremental fixes, may be needed often show up in metrics leaders already review but may have normalised over time:
- Cycle times that stretch across weeks with little valueadding work; decision latency masked by meetings and email ‘confirmations.’
- Rework and exception rates that keep teams busy ‘fixing the process after the process.’
- Shadow processes, the proliferation of spreadsheets, messenger groups, and adhoc trackers that sit outside core systems.
- Customer pain: stagnant NPS (Net Promoter Score), low firstcontact resolution, rising churn despite higher spend on service.
- Financial friction: DSO (Days Sales Outstanding) creeping up, inventory turns down, costtoserve rising even as volumes grow.
When several of these persist, even after automation pilots, leaders are looking at a design issue, not a discipline issue (Hammer & Champy, 1993; Davenport, 1995). What makes BPR attractive, when done well, is its asymmetric upside. The classic cases, Ford slashing accountspayable workloads by redesigning the matchpay process; insurers collapsing weeks into hours, show that rethinking flows, roles, and information beats mechanising yesterday’s forms (Hammer, 1990; Hammer & Champy, 1993). Today, digital tooling amplifies those gains; process mining and task mining can expose the actual endtoend paths across millions of transactions, revealing bottlenecks, rework loops, and value leakage; one large retailer identified $200–$500 million in potential savings by acting on those insights (McKinsey, 2019; McKinsey, 2024). Meanwhile, companies that invest systematically in automation report materially higher savings and faster timetovalue than laggards (Bain & Company, 2024; 2023).
Still, BPR is not for every problem. When performance gaps are local and stable, targeted Lean/Six Sigma or an agile fix suffices. BPR earns its keep when the value proposition has shifted (e.g., a Nepali telco moving from prepaid voice to digital bundles and fintech), when the costtoserve breaks the margin model, or when growth is structurally constrained by handoffs, compliance rework, or inconsistent data. Think of the household rice ritual: rinsing until the water runs clear, adjusting watertograin ratios, controlling heat. If the guests suddenly doubles and diets change, a different vessel, sequence, and serving pattern may be wiser than simply turning the flame higher.
For leaders who ask ‘What will actually happen if we commit to BPR?’ a pragmatic, derisked path is anchored in strategy, enabled by data, powered by people and looks like the following:
1. Clarify value and constraints. Tie the redesign to a strategic promise, e.g., 48hour loan decisions for SMEs nationwide; with explicit target outcomes and guardrails.
2. Discover the truth of today, the ‘as-is’ state. Use process mining, ethnography, and controls testing to map the real flow (not the SOP), quantify leakage, and establish baselines.
3. Challenge first principles. Start from the customer and regulatory outcome and work backward; zerobased the steps, roles, controls, and data needed; remove legacy assumptions.
4. Design the ‘tobe’ and the digital spine. Define the minimum lovable process and its system architecture: eventdriven workflows, straightthrough processing, automation for deterministic tasks, AI for classification, triage, and decision support, with robust data stewardship.
5. Prove and scale. Pilot one highvalue journey (say, ordertocash in Province 3), lock in benefits, and scale via a BPM (Business Process Management) operating model; standards, roles, and a lean ‘process excellence’ team.
5. Make it stick. Align incentives, upskill managers, refresh job designs, and publish a living scorecard (OTIF – On-Time In-Full, FCR – First Call Resolution, DSO – Days Sales Outstanding, rework %, exception rate %, timetodecision).
Two cautions matter in Nepal’s context. First, technology is not the transformation. Decades of evidence show that most large transformations underperform; less than 30% fully succeed; in digital programs, only 16% report sustained performance gains (McKinsey, 2018). Second, people and culture decide the outcome. When BPR is run as a topdown software rollout, it invites resistance; when it is framed as purposeled redesign with clear roles, reskilling, and frank communication, it earns energy. Davenport’s critique from the 1990s still rings true: forget the human system and the effort becomes a fad that exhausts the organisation (Davenport, 1995).
In practice, the marriage that matters is (Technology × Process Thinking × Management Commitment). IT exposes truth and enables flow; process discipline provides the choreography; executive resolve supplies protection, pacing, and priorities (Davenport & Short, 1990; Davenport, 1993). Get the trio right, and reengineering becomes a platform for operational excellence, not a oneoff crusade. Get it wrong; especially by overindexing on software and underinvesting in culture, communication, and capability, and leaders risk turning BPR into a byword for layoffs, disruption, and fatigue rather than empowerment and renewal (Davenport, 1995; Hammer & Champy, 1993).
Why Well-Intended Programmes Fail
Understanding what BPR is and when it is required is only half the battle. The harder truth lies in why so many organisations, globally and locally have stumbled when they tried. The statistics alone are sobering: studies repeatedly point to failure rates in the range of 60% to 70% (Hammer & Champy, 1993; Davenport, 1995). Steve Denning, reflecting on the BPR wave, argued that the movement ‘failed not because it lacked logic, but because it lacked humanity’ (Denning, 2011). In other words, processes could be redrawn on paper, but without winning the hearts and minds of people, the blueprint remained sterile.
“Technology may enable transformation, but only people and culture can sustain it.”
The same patterns are visible in Nepali boardrooms today. Too often, reengineering is equated with installing a new ERP module, adding more approval checkboxes, or hiring a technology vendor who promises a turnkey solution. Leaders believe they are transforming, yet what they are really doing is layering new pipes on top of old plumbing. The flow improves little; the frustration deepens. Here, the lesson from the 1990s is stark: technology amplifies process design, but it cannot substitute for it (Davenport & Short, 1990).
The cultural dynamics of Nepali business make the risks even sharper. In many organisations, decision-making remains tightly centralised; every approval escalated upwards, every deviation feared as risk. Leaders, in turn, take pride in being the ‘chief firefighter,’ responding to every operational crisis with personal intervention. While this creates the aura of control, it also creates dependency. In such an environment, a top-down reengineering initiative can feel less like empowerment and more like yet another directive; just another fire to be endured.
Think of it as replanting a field. A farmer who ploughs deeper, brings new seed, and sets up modern irrigation may well expect a better harvest. But if the soil has not been replenished, if the farmhands feel no ownership of the crop, and if the local climate is misunderstood, the effort fails no matter how modern the tools. Similarly, organisational soil; culture, trust, and communication must be fertile for reengineering to take root. Without that, projects wither.
The temptation for many business leaders in Nepal is to treat BPR as a prestige project: a way to show the board or shareholders that ‘something transformative’ is being done. The glossy charts arrive, consultants fly in, systems are reconfigured, and press releases trumpet ‘transformation.’ Yet on the ground, middle managers are bewildered, staff feel threatened, and customers see little difference. The gap between promise and practice widens. What emerges is not renewal but fatigue. As Davenport (1995) observed, BPR often became a euphemism for downsizing rather than an instrument of empowerment.
“Reengineering is not about drawing new charts — it is about reshaping mindsets.”
What makes this reflection urgent for Nepal is the volatility of its business climate. Markets swing quickly; regulatory landscapes shift; new entrants appear overnight. In such conditions, leaders cannot afford another cycle of ‘initiative fatigue.’ A failed reengineering effort does more than waste money; it erodes credibility, hardens resistance, and convinces managers that the next initiative will be just as hollow.
This is why the most seasoned voices stress that successful reengineering is less about drawing radical diagrams and more about reshaping mindsets. It requires humility from leadership: to admit that processes built under their watch may no longer serve; to share ownership of change with teams; to listen as much as they direct. In the Nepali context, where leaders are often celebrated for knowing everything, the courage lies in being willing to unknow; to unlearn habits of control and rediscover the discipline of redesign.
Here’s a concluding paragraph for the Critical Reflection section, tailored to highlight the urgency of BPR in Nepal’s public institutions while tying back to your earlier themes of centralisation, culture, and failed technology-first approaches:
If the case for reengineering is compelling in business, it is even more urgent in Nepal’s public institutions, which carry the daily burden of serving millions. Despite years of investment in digitisation; online portals for tax, passport applications, or land registration, the public often experiences little relief. Systems crash, queues lengthen, approvals still climb the same steep ladder of hierarchy, and citizens leave more frustrated than before. In truth, what failed was not the technology but the unchanged process logic beneath it: decision-making remains tightly centralised, every deviation still feared as risk, every signature still guarded like treasure. The lesson echoes what global BPR pioneers warned decades ago; without redesigning the flow of authority, roles, and accountability, software becomes another layer of bureaucracy. For Nepal’s public sector, the call is clear: genuine BPR, rooted in cultural change, empowerment, and service orientation, is no longer an option but an obligation.
From One-Time Overhauls to Continuous Renewal
The story of reengineering, however, did not end with its bruising failures. Like rivers that disappear underground only to resurface miles later, the principles of BPR flowed into new channels; reshaped, rebalanced, and better equipped for a more complex age. Out of the wreckage of one-time revolutions emerged the discipline of Business Process Management (BPM), which shifted the lens from grand redesigns to the sustained orchestration of processes. Where BPR had promised dramatic one-off leaps, BPM emphasised continuous monitoring, incremental improvement, and adaptability (Jeston & Nelis, 2014).
“Nepal’s organisations need not repeat the failures of the past; they can leapfrog into the future.”
In the last decade, this evolution has converged with the digital wave. Tools like process mining now expose the real journeys of work across millions of transactions; showing where approvals linger, where handoffs pile up, and where exceptions silently drain value. Robotic Process Automation (RPA), once a novelty, is now embedded in back offices across industries, quietly moving data, validating entries, and freeing human hands for judgement rather than drudgery. And artificial intelligence has begun to push the frontier further; classifying documents, predicting risks, even guiding customer interactions in real time (McKinsey, 2024). These are not the blunt instruments of yesterday’s automation; they are scalpels capable of precision redesign.
For business leaders in Nepal, the shift matters profoundly. Many organisations still carry the scars of hurried ERP rollouts and underwhelming ‘digitisation’ drives that promised much but delivered little. What was missing was not intent but integration; the ability to marry technology, process thinking, and leadership commitment into a coherent programme. The lesson from BPM and digital transformation is that redesign is not a single earthquake but a series of carefully paced tremors that reshape the organisational terrain without bringing down the building.
Consider the country’s retail banks. The promise of digital KYC was meant to make onboarding seamless. But in institutions that paired the new technology with rethought workflows and empowered frontline staff, turnaround times fell sharply, customer satisfaction rose, and compliance strengthened. In others, where the tool was bolted on to old approval chains, queues simply shifted from the branch counter to the server queue, and customer frustration endured. The same pattern is visible in manufacturing: firms that combined lean redesign of shop-floor flows with sensors and automated quality checks saw significant productivity gains, while those that merely imported machines without process change found themselves with costlier bottlenecks.
The new language for this mindset is operational excellence; an approach that treats transformation not as a project with an end date but as a discipline woven into the fabric of strategy and culture. In practice, it means leaders reviewing not only financials but also process health indicators: first-contact resolution, order-to-cash cycle time, rework rates, and customer effort scores. It means treating employees as co-architects of change, not passive recipients of a new system. Most importantly, it means recognising that in today’s hyperconnected environment, processes are no longer static flows on paper; they are living ecosystems shaped by data, customers, and technology in real time.
For Nepali business leaders, the challenge is no longer whether to embrace BPR’s spirit, but how to reinterpret it. The call is not for another ‘big bang’ overhaul, but for the discipline of building organisations that can renew themselves continuously. It is less like demolishing and rebuilding a house every 20 years, and more like tending a garden; pruning, watering, and planting in rhythm with the seasons, while introducing new tools that make the gardener wiser and more precise.
The Hard Truths for Today’s Leaders
The arc of reengineering’s story brings us back to the practical question every leader must answer: What does this mean for me, here and now? The lessons are neither abstract nor optional; they determine whether transformation becomes a source of renewal or another cycle of fatigue.
The first lesson is that strategy must lead, not follow. Too often in Nepal, leaders purchase systems, redesign workflows, or chase ‘efficiency projects’ without anchoring them in a clear strategic intent. The result is activity without direction; organisations that move faster, but not necessarily closer to where they need to go. Reengineering that begins with technology is like constructing a bridge without first deciding which river it must cross. The guiding question for every business leader should be: what promise are we making to customers and stakeholders that today’s processes cannot deliver?
Second, the hierarchy of success is unequivocal: people > process > technology. Processes can be redesigned, systems can be installed, but if people are disengaged or fearful, the effort collapses under its own weight. Employee empowerment is not a feel-good add-on; it is the engine of change. In Nepal’s context, where employees often wait for instructions rather than experiment with improvements, leaders must deliberately cultivate an environment where questioning old routines is rewarded, not punished. The most successful reengineering initiatives are those where frontline voices shape solutions, where middle managers are trained as change agents, and where leadership demonstrates consistency between what it says and what it does.
Third, communication is oxygen. Many initiatives falter not because the design is flawed, but because the intent is misunderstood. Staff interpret ‘reengineering’ as downsizing; managers treat it as another compliance exercise; customers see promises but feel no difference. Leaders must over-communicate the ‘WHY?’, narrate progress transparently, and listen actively. Without this, even the best-designed transformation risks being seen as another top-down imposition.
Fourth, culture eats process redesign for breakfast. A Nepali bank can invest millions in a new core banking system, but if its culture still insists on five layers of approval for a single loan, the cycle time will not change. A manufacturing firm can automate quality checks, but if its supervisors still fear reporting defects, data will be distorted. Cultural patterns; ego at the top, fear in the middle, resignation at the bottom, are far harder to reengineer than workflows, but without addressing them, no transformation sustains.
“The process most in need of reengineering is not on paper, but in the convictions of leaders.”
Finally, the most sobering lesson: short-termism carries a heavy cost. Many Nepali business leaders pride themselves on their ability to deliver quarterly results or to outmanoeuvre competitors in tactical moves. Yet, ignoring transformation for the sake of immediate margins is like eating the seed meant for planting. It brings a brief satisfaction but leaves the fields barren. The price of not investing in continuous renewal is invisibility in tomorrow’s market.
The leaders who will stand apart in Nepal’s next decade will not be those who only fight fires, but those who build fireproof organisations; where processes are aligned with strategy, where people are trusted to innovate, and where technology is harnessed thoughtfully, not worshipped blindly. The enduring truth is simple but profound: it is not systems or charts that transform organisations, but the convictions and choices of those who lead them.
The Reengineering Renaissance Within Reach
The story comes full circle. What began three decades ago as a manifesto for radical redesign has matured into a more balanced truth: that transformation is not about obliteration for its own sake, but about renewal with purpose, discipline, and humanity. The classic vision of Hammer and Champy; to rethink the very way work is done still holds, but it now finds its strength when paired with the continuous discipline of BPM, the precision of digital tools, and the wisdom of leaders who put people at the heart of change.
For Nepal, this is not a distant management theory; it is an urgent opportunity. Our businesses, still young compared to global peers, need not repeat the mistakes of the past. They can leapfrog, using process mining instead of paper audits, RPA instead of repetitive clerical work, AI instead of gut instinct alone; while at the same time building cultures where employees are trusted to adapt, question, and innovate. If public institutions commit to the same discipline, citizens too will feel the change: fewer queues, faster services, greater dignity in daily interactions.
The call to leaders, then, is not only to reengineer processes but to reexamine purpose: Why do we exist? Whom do we serve? How do we ensure that the promises made in boardrooms are felt in the lives of customers, employees, and citizens? True transformation demands courage; the courage to unlearn, to listen, and to lead not just for this quarter but for the next generation.
If embraced with conviction, Nepal’s organisations can chart a different path: from reactive firefighting to proactive renewal, from incrementalism to bold reinvention, from brittle hierarchies to agile, resilient systems of value creation. This is the renaissance within reach, if only leaders choose it.
“Short-term fixes bring momentary relief; only continuous renewal builds resilience.”
Because in the end, the process most in need of reengineering is not the one drawn on paper, but the one etched in the minds and behaviours of those who lead, and those who follow.
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[Khatri is Management Consultant and Educator. He can be reached at sohan.khatri@gmail.com]
