Let the Customer Drive Your Business with “Lean CRM”

Original Post: 7/19/2004
When Michael Hammer wrote his now infamous book, Reengineering the Corporation, his recommendation was to start business process reengineering (BPR) as close to the customer as possible and then work back into the company, cutting costs and headcount as you went. At least that was the theory.

The bitter experience of most companies who tried it was that although it did have a positive impact on efficiency and costs, it had a much bigger negative impact on effectiveness, business adaptability and revenue growth. A study by McKinsey & Company in the late ’90s found that a lack of joined-up business thinking lay behind the 75 percent of BPR programs that destroyed value for the companies that tried it. Today, nobody talks much about BPR.

Many of the reasons why BPR failed are the same ones now shown to be behind CRM’s own similarly high failure rate. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

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