Reengineering: Your costs of sales continue to climb, you have layers of people entering orders, answering status questions, and answering product specification questions. You can't add customers without increasing this type of sales support and you’re losing profits to spiraling costs. You start to brainstorm radical new ways to deliver sales support that will dramatically improve customer satisfaction and streamline your operations. Your answer comes in the form of an Internet based on-line sales support system. Your customers have the ability to generate their own quotes and orders, review product specifications and track the status of their orders seven days a week 24 hours a day from anywhere in the world via the web. Your customers are delighted at their new found empowerment, and you can grow sales and profits again. This is reengineering.

In the first example, an existing process was analyzed and a technology enabling enhancement was added to improve the process. In the second example, a radical new approach to conducting business was implemented. The customer was empowered to serve themselves directly. This type of business change required cross-functional changes throughout the organization. Accounting and credit processes were revamped. Information systems were redesigned. Sales and marketing had to make a major shift in their approach to your customers. In short you just went through an organizational, procedural, systematic paradigm shift, not to be taken lightly.