DMR speaks to Professor Leo Brecht, process expert, about the status of process management in companies and asks for his outlook on future trends, especially process analytics. 

DMR: In 1993, Michael Hammer and James Champy published their groundbreaking bestseller, “Reengineering the Corporation”, which established process management as one of the major management approaches of recent years, even decades. To what extent has process thinking actually arrived in companies in the meantime? What status, in comparison with that time, does process management have today?

L. Brecht: Hammer and Champy’s bestseller really stirred up excitement: in consulting companies, in research institutes, and in business enterprises. After the first big wave, the hype about process management was strongly overshadowed by the whole topic of e-business at the end of the 1990s and by the middle of 2000 was being used more as a measure to cut costs. What I now observe is a much greater emphasis on the value of ­customer ­orientation and ideas to increase effectiveness.  

When I analyze firms now, I can see that some companies here and there have progressed a very long way. But there are still plenty of firms which understand process management to mean the classic procedural organization. A broad spectrum of companies has made great progress in this area, based on the work done by Hammer and Champy. But there are also some which are right at the beginning and using models such as EFQM ­(European Foundation for Quality Management) as their basis. 

DMR: So you would not say that process management is an old hat?  

L. Brecht: Absolutely not. But the focus has changed. Greater orientation to customers is today still at the forefront, but in the meantime there are other methods and tools which can be used to realize customer orientation. I am thinking here of ­topics such as customer value calculation, quantitative customer segmentation, or the contents which I classify under the term of “process analytics”. Processes must be quantitatively evaluated and analyzed much more than it has been done in the past.