Resaerch Proposal For MBA Final
Resaerch Proposal For MBA Final
Resaerch Proposal For MBA Final
Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
The work environment of the present day has become so complex and challenging due to the
change of technology, customer expectations, social and political pressures. In order to be
adaptable and alert enough to respond the challenges and opportunities organizations has tried to
introduce new working tools like BPR (Business Process Reengineering). BPR is the
fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic
improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality, and
service and speed (Hammer and Champy, 1993:36). The goal of business process re-engineering
is to redesign and change the existing business practices or process to achieve dramatic
improvement in organizational performance. On the other hand, due to BPR failure factors BPR
projects can fail to meet the inherently high expectations of reengineering. As Hammer and
Champy in Mashari and Zairi the percentage of BPR failures to be estimated as high as 70% due
to executives' failure to either implement success factors properly or the confusion surrounding
BPR, and how it should be performed (Mashari and Zairi, 1999:87). This reveals that the
implementation process of BPR requires greater attention, follows up and commitment on the
part of top management.
By taking into account the driving forces of the 3Cs: Customer, Competition and Change, over
the last few years, most government organizations in Ethiopia implement BPR to improve their
performances and customer satisfaction. Among these organizations, Ministry of National
Defense and its sub units has tried to restructure and implement BPR since 2009/2010. The focus
of this research paper is making an assessment on the implementation of BPR in Defense
Finance Management Sector.
Defense finance management sector has finance, budget programming and Procurement
directorates at the head quarter and there are 30 teams under each directorate. The number of
managers and employees within the directorates and teams vary depending on the work volume
and location of the budget holders. The number of managers and employees are 784, which is
118 and 666 within the directorates and budget holders respectively. By taking this in to account
the sector has involved in implementing BPR since 2009/2010. Even though the implementation
process has taken place, the real observations of the implementation process, comments of
customers, staff employees and written official reports don’t show the success of BPR
implementation. This is the reason why the research is relevant and timely initiated.
In relation to the sources of data, the primary sources are mainly focused on managers and
employees of the sector. In addition to primary sources; secondary sources the management’s
evaluation reports, comments on BPR implementation process, related valuable literatures and
documents can be taken as sources of data to make the research more reliable and dependable.
structures and procedures and inventing completely new ways of accomplishing work from clean
sheet. Reengineering is about business reinvention-not business improvement, enhancement or
modification.
c) Dramatic Improvement
Reengineering is not marginal improvements rather it is achieving quantum leaps in
performance. Dramatic improvement demands blowing up the old and replacing it with
something new. Hammer and Champy identified three kinds of companies that undertake
reengineering: companies that find themselves in deep trouble, companies that are not in trouble
but whose management can see trouble coming and companies that are in peak condition and see
an opportunity to develop a lead over their competitors (Hammer and Champy, 1993:34).
d) Business Processes
The last but the most important of the four key words is the word-‘process. It is a collection of
activities that takes one or more kinds of input and creates an output that is of value to the
customer. In other words, the delivery of the ordered goods to the customer’s hands is the value
that the process creates.
2.1.2 What is Not Business Process Reengineering?
People assume that reengineering is much the same as other business improvement programs like
information technology (automation), restructuring or downsizing. However, has little or nothing
in common with any of these programs and differs in significant ways (Hammer and Champy,
1993:48). After the reengineering process has been done and the process calls these
improvement programs, these can be taken as tools to make the reengineering process
implementation more simple, efficient and effective.
2.2 BPR Implementation Success and Failure Factors
As it is discussed earlier BPR has great potential for increasing productivity through reduced
process time and cost, improved quality, and greater customer satisfaction, but it requires a
fundamental organizational change. As a result, the implementation process is complex, and
needs to be checked against several success/failure factors to ensure successful implementation,
as well as to avoid implementation problems. According to Mashari and Zairi, 1999:87, the
implementation success and failure factors are mainly related to change management,
management competency and support, organizational structure, project planning and
management and IT infrastructure. And these are discussed as follows
4. References
1. Bashein B. J., Markus, M.L and Riley, P. (1994). Preconditions for BPR success: and
How to prevent Failure, Information System Management, 11(2):7– 13.
2. Hammer, M. and Champy, J. (1993), ``reengineering the corporation: a manifesto for
business revolution'', Harper Business, New York, NY.
3. Hammer, M. and Stanton, S. (1995), ``the reengineering revolution'', HarperCollins, New
York, NY.
4. Rusell M. Linden (1994), Seamless Government: Practical Guide to Re-engineering in
the Public Sector, Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco.
5. Majed Al-Mashari and Mohamed Zairi (1999), Business Process Management Journal,
Vol. 5 No. 1, 1999, pp. 87-112. # MCB University Press, 1463-7154
6. Peter O’Neill and Amrik S. Sohal (1999) Business Process Reengineering: A review of
recent literature. Technovation 19 (1999) 571–581 www.elsevier.com