Reengineering at American Express: The Travel Services Group’s work in process

American Express became involved in reengineering when we found that we could not close our major gaps in cost, quality, and speed through continuous improvement. While embarking on a series of margin improvements to bring our short-term economics back into line, we also selected two major processes for strategic reengineering, to make fundamental longer-term changes in the way we do business. Although we have just begun to implement the major redesigns, we have already learned the following lessons that could help you in your reengineering efforts: set up a group to enable reengineering, beware of the ‘reengineering’ label, start small, start all projects with the customer, agree on your redesign before you set cost-savings targets, include key functions as early as possible, highlight linkages between projects, challenge the status quo, use a structured approach to managing the changes, and people will not believe it until it happens to them.