BUSINESS PROCESS REENGINEERING IN NIGERIA

Business Process Reengineering in Nigeria



Table of Contents

Introduction3

Purpose of the Study4

Prior Research5

Public Sector Organisations7

The Case Study10

The Solution -- Role Restructuring12

The Role Restructuring Process15

Formulation of a mission statement and long term vision15

Envision new processes15

Identify IT levers16

Redesign of the chosen processes17

Initiate change17

Implementation18

Evaluation19

Project Success19

Conclusions20

References24

Business Process Reengineering In Nigeria

Introduction

As Business Process Re-engineering is relatively new there is a lack of empirical research in the field. Of the few studies conducted, the focus has been on the large organisation, and the majority have used the case study approach on one or a few individual firms. Despite the youth of the field, certain principles and attempts at establishing a universal reengineering methodology have emerged. However, there has been little consideration for the small firm in the Business Process Re-engineering literature. This is confirmed by the small proportion of the literature specifically encompassing the small business, and of this small amount, even less is written explicitly for the small firm. There is a need to investigate the small firm arena in order to determine whether the same principles for Business Process Re-engineering apply, or whether a different approach needs to be taken by a small business looking for radical change.

Business process re-engineering (BPR) is being attempted by many firms that are looking for radical gains from the successful redesign of their processes. Business Process Re-engineering is a high risk, time consuming activity, with no guarantee of success, and yet many businesses claim to be re-engineering their processes. There is no universal definition of Business Process Re-engineering, however common components of individual definitions exist. Typical characteristics of Business Process Re-engineering include: the radical redesign of business processes; the deployment of information technology as an enabler; major disruption to the organisation during the process of reengineering; and attempts at achieving organisation wide improvements in performance (Davenport 2003; Hammer & Champy, 2003.; Grover, Teng & Fiedler, 2003).

Purpose of the Study

This study attempts to provide some initial indication of the extendability of the existing principles and methodologies in the Business Process Re-engineering literature to the small firm in Nigeria. A number of Business Process Re-engineering methodologies have been provided, however, the range of firms for which they are devised is not often stated. It is possible that the characteristics of the small firm are such that a customised approach to Business Process Re-engineering is necessary. In order to investigate this, a case study on a Nigerian firm consisting of four divisions was conducted. The next section summarises the literature, including Business Process Re-engineering methodologies, and the application of Business Process Re-engineering to public sector organisations. The method used in the study is outlined in the third section, followed by the results from the case study. Finally the implications of the results are discussed, and conclusions are drawn.

Prior Research

Business process reengineering as it is practised today, was first defined in 2000 by Michael Hammer in his article "Don't Automate, Obliterate". This paper outlined seven principles of reengineering which were considered to be essential for any reengineering ...