Risk Management for Business Process Reengineering: The Case of a Public Sector Organization

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is the radical transformation of an organization’s structure, culture, and business processes aiming at the improvement of factors such as cost, quality, service, and speed, which questions the core of an organization’s way to do everyday business. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is also a process that causes turbulences even on a well-structured and effectively organized corporation. Business history is full of examples of failure in BPR projects and ERP implementation. Therefore, the combination of two high-risk processes applied simultaneously on an organization—especially when it is characterized by lack of human resources, absence of documented work flows, obsolete ICT infrastructure, and negative corporate culture—makes the adoption of a risk management approach from the initial stages of the project indispensable. The purpose of this paper is to present such a case of a public sector organization so as to highlight the importance of critical success and failure factors for ERP-led BPR projects. The results show that organizational culture, top management commitment, use of information technology, organizational structure, and the ability to incorporate change management are fundamental factors that can contribute to successful BPR/ERP implementation. On the other hand, the resistance to change was found to be the most dominant critical failure factor.