PI · Process Innovation
Process Innovation · BPR
What is PI?
- Start from why, not from faster
- It sticks only when systems, rules, and evaluation change together
- Automating without fixing the process just digitizes the waste
What process innovation really changes is not the shape of the flowchart but who owns the work and who has decision authority. When work that has been split into small pieces across individuals is regrouped into a single flow, the time documents spend waiting as they pass from desk to desk disappears. In most processes, what eats up lead time is not the work itself but the time spent waiting for someone's decision. That is why a successful innovation does not produce a 'faster procedure'. It produces a 'procedure that fewer people complete, with greater authority'.
When choosing projects, it is safer to draw the boundary first. Work that stays within one department is an improvement project, and only work that touches three or more departments is raised as an innovation project. Electronic approval and RPA are not innovation in themselves. They are tools that support the redesigned flow, so if you reverse the order, they deliver no results. When drawing the To-Be, design around the standard cases that make up 80% of total volume and route rare exceptions through a separate path. Trying to capture every exception often leaves the new process more complicated than the old one.
The point where things most often go wrong in practice is the order: signing the system contract first and fixing the process afterward. The existing approval steps then move onto the screen unchanged, and work that took three days on paper ends up taking 2.5 days electronically. Unless the sign-off rules and evaluation criteria are fixed at the same time, the new procedure reverts to the old one within six months. Team leads who inherit the authority fear mistakes and start asking their superiors again out of habit, and informal approval comes back to life. There is one more trap: the moment innovation is announced together with headcount cuts, the cooperation of the business units ends that very day. Say up front what the saved time will be used for, and the data you collect will be honest.
John KimCEO of Nanum Consulting and author of B2B Marketing Design
Sungil KimGlobal pitching expert from KAIST and Samsung Electronics who coached the winning teams at the UN Tourism and Select USA IR pitch competitionsThe starting point is the BPR concept that Michael Hammer and James Champy introduced in their 1993 book Reengineering the Corporation. After critics pointed out the side effects of full-scale redesign, it evolved into a phased approach that combines continuous improvement with digital transformation.
Consider a hypothetical case: Company A, an industrial parts distributor with 380 employees and annual revenue of around KRW 90 billion (≈ US$67,335,000). It took an average of 5.2 days to reply to client quote requests, while competitors answered within two days. A four-month redesign project began when the head of sales asked, 'Do we need to add headcount?'
- When the sales support manager pulled the system processing records for 1,842 quotes over the past six months, only about three hours of the average 5.2 days were spent actually calculating cost; the rest was all waiting.
- The bottleneck was price confirmation. While the purchasing manager put off replying, saying 'we have to ask the factory,' each quote sat for an average of 2.7 days with no owner.
- When the task force laid out the past 18 months of rejection history for the four approvers, the executive in charge said, 'I only sent back three,' and on the spot quotes under KRW 30 million (≈ US$22,400) became team-lead sign-off.
- They built a standard price list for the top 200 items by turnover so sales could look up prices directly, and revised the ERP quote screen, the sign-off rules, and the sales support team's KPIs all on the same day.
- Four months later, the average reply time fell from 5.2 days to 1.4, and the quote-to-win rate rose from 18% to 24%. Not a single person was laid off, and two sales support staff moved to sourcing new accounts.