Prospects and Challenges to Implement Business Process Reengineering (BPR) in Ethiopian Public Universities
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Date
2011-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Since educational institutions function similar to other types of business organization, they can
use Business Process Reengineering (BPR) to enhance their performances in terms of reducing
processes‟ cost and cycle time, increasing service quality, and increasing customers and
employees satisfactions. Likewise, starting from 2008 and 2009, all Ethiopian public universities
engaged in BPR project to enhance their performances dramatically. However, the
implementation phase of BPR pointed as the most challenging one. Thus, this study intended to
identify factors that deemed as challenging factors of BPR implementation.
To address study‟s objectives, sequential explanatory strategy of mixed methods research design
adopted. Specifically, in the first phase of the study, survey was conducted on four public
universities. To identify various challenging factors of BPR implementation, forty BPR project
redesign and implementation team members in the universities were subjects of the study. In the
second phase, after results obtained in the first phase, interviews were held with three
interviewees to better understand the magnitudes of challenging factors. The study statistically
analyzed the data obtained in the first phase. Then, results obtained in the first phase elicited to
get qualitative data and thematically analyzed the qualitative data obtained in the second phase.
Results of this mixed method research design in the first phase shows that between 11 to 40
percent of the redesigned processes implemented at universities and to implement the entire
processes, the implementation phase believed to take more than three years. Results also
identified universities‟ support processes (administrative) as challenging to implement compare
to core processes (academic). Besides, out of the thirty challenging factors included in the survey
instrument, more than 50 percent of respondents showed a higher degree of agreement to
seventeen factors as the most challenging factors that impeded redesigned processes from being
implemented. However, results in the second phase shows that, of the seventeen factors, the
magnitudes of nine factors to delay the implementation phase were severe. These include
problems originated from change-management factors, top management support factors,
organizational factors, and country factors. Generally, this study suggests to take corrective
measures by the universities‟ management body and Ethiopian Ministry of Education before the
project completely fail.
Keywords: BPR implementation; Challenging factors; Ethiopian public universities
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Keywords
Challenging factors, BPR implementation, Ethiopian public universities