Business Process ReengineeringToday's manufacturing industry is challenged by slow growth and a challenging global economy. To remain competitive in the global market, manufacturers are adopting radical business strategies, such as flattening the organization, globalizing production, forming strategic alliances with customers, suppliers, and competitors, merging with other companies to form new structures, decentralizing business units, and creating global companies. Having to deal with an entirely new set of non-traditional competitors can slow the progress of even the leanest companies. This has made Business Process Re-Engineering (BPR) necessary for manufacturers of all sizes (Greenberg, 2004). Background There are numerous definitions of Business Process Re-Engineering (BPR). Klein and Manganelli in their book "The Reengineering Handbook" define it as the "rapid and radical redesign of strategic, value-added business processes - and the systems, policies and organizational structures that support them - to optimize workflows and productivity within an organization (Greenberg, 2004) define it as “The means by which an organization can achieve radical change” in their book “Business Process Reengineering: Breakpoint Strategies for Market Dominance”. in performance, measured by cost, cycle time, service and quality, through the application of a variety of tools and techniques that focus on the business as a set of interrelated, customer-oriented core business processes rather than as a set of organizational functions. Robert Jacobs in his book "Real Time Strategic Change" defines strategic change (similar in concept to BPR) as an "informed, participatory process that leads to new ways of doing business that position an entire organization for success, now and in future." (Greenberg, 2004). Business Needs Analysis The first step of any process is to define the process levels and needs to meet these different phases of any business reengineering plan. The reason why we must define and frame the set of objectives or needs required by the company is to solve the problem and not the symptom of a problem. This can easily happen if you do not follow a thorough analysis by asking the following questions divided into 6 steps. (Greenberg, 2004). Phase 1Preparation: What is the level of organizational commitment; what are the expectations; What are the objectives of the project? Who should be on the team? What skills are required? How will the results be communicated to the organization? Phase 2Identification: what are the main business processes? How do these processes interact with customer and supplier processes?; Phase 3Vision: what are the sub-processes, activities and steps that make up the main business processes; How resources, information and work flow through each process; Why we do the things we do now (get out of the box or mental prison);