Business Process Improvement (BPI):

Business Process Improvement (BPI) is a systematic approach to help any organization make significant changes in the way it does business. The organization may be a for-profit business, a non-profit organization, a government agency, or any other ongoing concern.
BPI works by:
• Defining the organization's strategic goals and purposes (Who are we, what do we do, and why do we do it?)
• Determining the organization's customers (or stakeholders) (Who do we serve?)
• Aligning the business processes to realize the organizantion's goals (How do we do it better?)
The goal of BPI is a radical change in the performance of an organization, rather than a series of incremental changes.
The first step in BPI is to define the organization's mission, existing structure and processes (AS-IS).
Then the BPI process owners should determine what outcomes would add value to the organization's mission and objectives (TO-BE).
Once the outcomes are determined, the organization's work force needs to be reshaped to meet the new missions and objectives, and a series of benchmarks, including cost metrics, should be put into place. It is during these latter steps that much of the resistance to BPI becomes apparent.