Yours will be the most successful business in your industry if you are able to engineer your business to design and build the fastest, most attractive, environment friendly and lowest operating cost solutions in the world like an engineer. For that you need to think like and be a Business Engineer.

Companies like Boeing, BMW, Honda, Nissan, Ford and General Motors spend $billions on their engineering capability for both the product design and production plants in the race to be the leading manufacturer with the winning products. While market share is all - and the Grand Prix - engineering excellence is mandatory for success.

Capital investment is large and the engineers have to be smart to stay in front. Small mistakes can lose large fortunes, lives and break companies. Balancing all the components of technology, skills, development and production processes to produce the marketing winners is a complex engineering task in itself. That's why attention to detail in the design and operational processes of their products is essential if the bigger picture is to work.

I often use the analogy that a business is like an engine geared to its markets. When the markets are growing fast then the engine gets lots of add-ons, becomes fatter and bigger, often operates at full speed and wears itself out usually breaking down at the most inconvenient times for its customers.

Then when the markets start to fade away the engine has insufficient fuel to sustain its capacity, becomes inefficient and starts ripping itself and their industry apart in restructuring exercises to try to regain market share, focus and balance. Meanwhile the Accountants crawl over the body on cost cutting exercises and usually deprive the sound and healthy alongside the unfit thereby adding to the confusion and creating health problems for the future - as any mechanic would advise you.

My advice to the Board is do not wait until it is going wrong start the process today and to go back to engineering principles. If you need help call in the Business Engineers not the Business Busters.

A business engineer will:

• Define the business purpose and goals
• Produce design models and solutions to achieve the purpose and goals
• Quality test the models and solutions
• Understand the solutions behavior
• Ensure Change Management is built into the design
• Build the capability, plant and components to produce the solutions
• Make the solution work in the customer's environment.
• Reassess and enhance the solution to meet the customer's changing goals
• Go back to the drawing board to meet the next set of challenges

Business engineering is about designing and building the best business for the market i.e. designing the winning business then staying with the market and moving it forward with you to the next stage of its development.

There are 5 essential ingredients for a winning business - people, processes, resources, suppliers and not least your customers, each working in harmony with each other. You need to build a Business Engineering Framework or Model for your business - which pays particular attention to the feedback and responsive mechanisms and understand the systems behavior of your ingredients.

A Business Framework identifies the main activities of the business, the relationships, flows, feedback and interfaces between them. The Framework should also contain the foundations on which the change programmes are developed, implemented and continually managed.

Several important principles to remember are:

1. The day after tomorrow will not be like today.
2. Innovation is inevitable and manageable
3. Managing innovation is the key to sustaining high levels of performance
4. Change programmes should be continuous and need not be IT led.
5. IT should be used to automate the changed business
6. Focus on programme management not functional management
7. Pilot solutions are learning exercises but also generate anxiety and frustration
8. Communicate again and again and again and again - never stop
9. Natural Change is a bottom up process and top down sponsored
10. Customers have their own agenda - make sure you stay on theirs.

A balanced business is a healthy business. Take care.

Judith Jones, a founding member of LISA, is Managing Director of Process UK - specialists in helping businesses develop Business Engineering Strategies and Solutions. She is the Chief Executive of the Business Engineering Partnership - a group of UK independent Business Engineers.

Process UK, Chiltern House, PO Box 2, Amersham, Bucks HP7 9BH, UK Tel: + 44 1494 431 774, Fax: + 44 1494 431 775, 100435.2144@compuserve.com