Hammer & Champy 1993 / 2001 — Reengineering the Corporation

The book-length statement of Business Process Reengineering (BPR), the movement that defined the rhetoric and methods of process change in the 1990s. The work originates as the 1993 HarperBusiness hardcover, building on Hammer's 1990 HBR article (sources/1990-hammer-reengineering-work). The PDF in raw/ is the 2001 "Updated and Revised" HarperBusiness/Perfectbound edition, which adds a new Prologue ("Reengineering for the Twenty-first Century", pp. 1–8), three replacement case-study chapters (Duke Power, IBM, Deere — Chs. 10–12), an Epilogue (pp. 235–236), and a Frequently Asked Questions chapter (pp. 237–246). The authors state that the body of the original text is essentially unchanged: "On the whole, we have made only minor editorial changes" (Prologue, p. 7).

The 1993 thesis

The core argument has not been edited. Reengineering is "the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and speed" (p. 35). Four key words carry the load:

Fundamental — ask "Why do we do what we do? And why do we do it the way we do?" Reengineering ignores what is and concentrates on what should be (pp. 35–36).
Radical — from Latin radix, root. Disregard existing structures and procedures, invent completely new ways of working: "business reinvention — not business improvement, business enhancement, or business modification" (p. 36).
Dramatic — quantum leaps, not the 10% incremental improvements that quality programs target. "Marginal improvement requires fine-tuning; dramatic improvement demands blowing up the old and replacing it with something new" (p. 36).
Processes — "the most important [word] in our definition" but "the one that gives most corporate managers the greatest difficulty." A business process is "a collection of activities that takes one or more kinds of input and creates an output that is of value to the customer" (p. 38).

Hammer & Champy explicitly position reengineering as reversing Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations paradigm — division of labour, specialist tasks, hierarchical control — which the authors argue produced the bureaucratic, fragmented organisations of the late twentieth century (pp. 13, 51–52). Reengineering is contrasted with downsizing, restructuring, automation, software reengineering, reorganisation, and TQM/kaizen (pp. 50–52); the boundary work in this chapter is what gave the BPR brand its initial bite.

The book's prescriptive content — types of triggering condition (companies in trouble, foreseeing trouble, wanting to widen their lead, p. 37), recurrent themes of a reengineered process (process orientation, ambition, rule-breaking, creative use of IT, p. 50), the role of IT as an "essential enabler" via inductive rather than deductive thinking (Ch. 5), the role architecture (process owner, leader, design team) — all dates to the 1993 manuscript and is preserved in the 2001 edition.

What changed in the 2001 prologue and FAQs

This is where the 2001 edition adds genuinely new material from the authors. It is the only place in the wiki's BPR corpus where Hammer & Champy speak about Hammer & Champy with a decade of hindsight. Five threads run through the new front-matter and the appended FAQs:

1. Defending against the "fad" narrative. The opening line is "Reengineering is back" (p. 1), but the authors quickly correct themselves: it "never went away" — companies kept doing it "out of the glare of the spotlight" (p. 2). They reject three popular dismissals: that BPR was a 1990s fad, that it was empty slogans, and that it was a synonym for downsizing (pp. 1–2). The FAQ revisits this directly: "No, it's not a fad" — the test being that real fads do not take a decade to work out, and that companies who applied the principles properly got the promised results (pp. 238–239).

2. Diagnosing what went wrong in the 1990s. The authors concede a real backlash — but blame implementation, not the concept. The pattern they describe (p. 4): "Give me reengineering, whatever it is, and give it to me fast" became the command of "uniformed chief executives"; reengineering was treated as a panacea the CEO could delegate; consultants who did not understand it sold it; and companies relabelled any improvement programme "reengineering", failing to do real radical redesign and then attributing the failure to the concept. "Soon 'reengineering' became devoid of meaning" (p. 4). This is the closest the book gets to acknowledging the critique made by sources/1994-davenport-stoddard-reengineering-mythic-proportions that the BPR brand had become incoherent — though Hammer & Champy frame it as misuse rather than as a flaw in their original framing.

3. Crediting reengineering for the late-1990s US productivity boom. A bold claim: Bill Gates, the microprocessor, and the Internet did not save US industry alone — "reengineering has been the key that unlocked the potential of [IT]" (p. 3). Without reengineering, "many sectors of the U.S. economy would not be flourishing as they are now" (p. 2). They cite American Express, American Standard, Ford, Chrysler, Texas Instruments, Duke Power, and the new IBM case study (Ch. 11) as Fortune 500 examples (p. 2). (unverified — the macroeconomic attribution is asserted, not evidenced.)

4. The next wave: e-engineering and inter-enterprise processes. ERP is identified as "the most important reengineering-related technology of the last five years"; companies that implemented ERP without first (or simultaneously) reengineering "were disappointed by the modest payoffs" (p. 5). The Internet then demands a fresh round: "Putting a Web site in front of lousy business processes merely advertises how lousy they are" (p. 6). Where 1990s reengineering dissolved intra-firm functional silos, the new wave dissolves inter-firm boundaries — product development, planning, and forecasting are "interenterprise in nature" (p. 6).

5. The single biggest retrospective change: process over radical. In the FAQ "Has your understanding of reengineering changed since the book was written?" the authors give what is, for our purposes, the most important sentence in the 2001 edition (pp. 239–240):

"Of the four [key words], we originally thought 'radical' was the most important. Since we wrote that, our emphasis has changed. We now think that the most important concept to grasp is 'process.' [...] even more fundamental in reengineering than the idea of doing things differently is making one's processes the heart of one's organization. The essence of our approach is to manage businesses around their processes. Sometimes they will require radical redesign, and sometimes they will not."

This is the seed of the BPM-vs-BPR distinction that the field eventually settled on: continuous, process-centred management (sometimes radical, often not) supersedes the one-shot radical redesign that the 1993 book demanded. It also matters that the authors do not say "we were wrong about radical" — they say their emphasis has moved. The book's body, with all its "blow up the old" rhetoric, is left intact.

A further confession buried in Chapter 13 (already in the 1993 text but worth flagging): the authors concede a 50–70% failure rate for reengineering attempts (p. 221). The 2001 FAQ defends this number as "historical, not predictive" (pp. 237–238) and lays the blame on the avoidable mistakes catalogued in Ch. 13.

The case evidence

Three classic 1993 cases (Ch. 2, "Reengineering: The Path to Change") are kept verbatim:

IBM Credit (pp. 39–42). Original process: 5 specialists in series, 6-day average turnaround. Walk-through revealed actual work was 90 minutes — the rest was queue and handoff time. Redesigned: a single generalist "deal structurer" with an expert system. Result: 7 days → 4 hours, "100 times" the deal volume, slight headcount reduction. Used to motivate every key word — radical change to the process as a whole, not the steps.
Ford Motor accounts payable (pp. 42–47). Benchmarked against Mazda's five-person AP team (vs. Ford's 500), Ford reengineered procurement (the actual end-to-end process), not "accounts payable" (which is "an organizational artifact, not a process", p. 43). The redesign eliminated the invoice and matched receipt directly to PO via a shared database — payment-on-receipt-of-goods. Result: 500 → 125 (in some divisions to 5% of original headcount, p. 45). The lesson Hammer & Champy hammer is the one that survived: reengineer processes, not departments.
Kodak product development (pp. 47–49). 35mm single-use camera response to Fuji, 1987. Old sequential/parallel hybrid process: 70 weeks. Redesigned around an integrated CAD/CAM product-design database (concurrent engineering): 38 weeks, 25% lower tooling cost.

In the 2001 edition these are joined by three replacement long-form case chapters — Duke Power (Ch. 10), IBM (Ch. 11), Deere (Ch. 12) — which the authors prefer because "the companies that followed and learned from [the early pioneers] have surpassed those trailblazers" (Prologue, p. 7). Hallmark, the 1993 edition's flagship "reengineering from a position of strength" example, survives only as a brief mention on p. 37. (Not deep-dived in this ingest; available for chapter-level deep-dives if needed.)

The role of IT (Chapter 5)

The book's IT chapter remains a useful primary source on how the 1990s saw the role of technology in process change. Two arguments:

Failure modes (Chapter 13)

The catalogue of "common errors that lead companies to fail at reengineering" (pp. 221–234) is where the 1993 book itself anticipates the implementation failures that the prologue revisits. Selected items:

Try to fix a process instead of changing it (pp. 222–223) — IBM Credit itself first tried automation, queueing theory, and per-step performance standards; all failed. Incrementalism is the path of least resistance and the surest way to fail.
Ignore everything except process redesign (pp. 224–225) — job design, structure, management systems, values must all be refashioned to maintain a coherent "business system diamond".
Quit too early (p. 227); settle for minor results (pp. 226–227); drag the effort out (p. 234) — Hammer & Champy's rule of thumb is twelve months from case-for-action to first field release.
Try to make reengineering happen from the bottom up (pp. 228–229) — frontline managers lack the cross-boundary perspective and authority; some middle managers will resist out of self-interest. Reengineering is "always born in the executive suite. All too often, it dies there as well" (p. 234).
Place prior constraints on the definition of the problem and the scope of the effort (pp. 227–228) — common failure: "to state that the target is a business process but then proceed to restrict the reengineering effort to an arbitrary and small segment of the process that happens to fit neatly within existing organizational boundaries" (p. 228).

These are useful as primary-source corroboration of the failure modes diagnosed by the secondary literature in syntheses/bpm-phases-and-bpr-legacy.

Position in the literature

Direct lineage from sources/1990-hammer-reengineering-work ("Don't automate, obliterate"). The 1993 book is the full-length working-out of that HBR thesis, with case studies, IT chapter, role architecture, change-management theory, and failure catalogue.
Sibling, not derivative, of sources/1993-davenport-process-innovation. Davenport is the more measured, IT-led, evolution-friendly statement of the same year; Hammer & Champy are the manifesto. The two together define Phase 1 BPR.
Critique in sources/1994-davenport-stoddard-reengineering-mythic-proportions — argues the BPR brand had already become incoherent by 1994, conflating clean-sheet redesign with strategy-led transformation and just-in-time implementation. Hammer & Champy's 2001 prologue partly concedes this ("'reengineering' became devoid of meaning", p. 4) but blames misuse, not the concept.
Operationalised by sources/2005-reijers-limanmansar-best-practices-bpr, which catalogues 29 BPR best practices — many of them direct derivatives of the Ch. 5 old-rule/new-rule pairs.
Pedagogical descendants: sources/2014-sharp-whats-wrong-with-this-process simplifies the "Case for Action" framing; sources/2018-dumas-fundamentals-of-bpm places this book at the head of its history of BPM (Ch. 1) and again in Ch. 8 on redesign.
Forward link: sources/2026-dumas-agentic-bpms-pyramid calls for an agentic extension of the Reijers catalogue, which sits atop this lineage.
The 2001 edition's retrospective elevation of "process" over "radical" (pp. 239–240) is the conceptual hinge between BPR and modern continuous, process-centred BPM as practised today — see syntheses/bpm-phases-and-bpr-legacy for the phased reconstruction.

Connections

Concepts: process orientation, end-to-end process, fundamental rethinking, radical redesign, dramatic improvement, business reinvention, role of IT as enabler, inductive thinking, case worker / deal structurer (generalist+expert system pattern), inter-enterprise processes ("e-engineering"), case for action, business system diamond.
Frameworks: BPR (canonical statement); the IT old-rule/new-rule schema underlying sources/2005-reijers-limanmansar-best-practices-bpr.
Entities: Michael Hammer; James Champy; IBM Credit; Ford; Kodak; Mazda; Duke Power; Deere; Hallmark.

Cited from

syntheses/bpm-phases-and-bpr-legacy — Phase 1 BPR reconstruction; treats this book as the canonical reference for the era's radical-redesign posture, and uses the 2001 prologue as primary evidence of authors-on-themselves.
sources/2005-reijers-limanmansar-best-practices-bpr — literature survey draws on Hammer & Champy.
sources/2014-sharp-whats-wrong-with-this-process — "Simplified from Hammer & Champy's five-point 'Case for Action'".
sources/2018-dumas-fundamentals-of-bpm — Ch. 1 (BPR history) and Ch. 8 (redesign).
sources/2026-dumas-agentic-bpms-pyramid — calls for agentic extension of the Reijers catalogue, which sits atop this lineage.

Cited by (within this wiki)

sources/1990-hammer-reengineering-work — the HBR origin article, expanded into this book.
sources/1993-davenport-process-innovation — sibling 1993 statement of process redesign.
sources/1994-davenport-stoddard-reengineering-mythic-proportions — early critique of the BPR brand.