skip to main content
10.1145/2072221.2072234acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageshtConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Business process management adoption: a case study of a South African supermarket retailer

Published: 03 October 2011 Publication History

Abstract

The management approaches to process change have been dominated by process-oriented theories and "best practices" and have been criticized for lacking a theoretical basis. Business Process Management (BPM) the latest approach is no exception. While BPM has had significant press, hype status and high adoption expectations, problems with adoption and justifying benefits to business exist. To increase understanding of these adoption concerns, this paper explores BPM in a leading Southern African supermarket retailer where various attempts had been made to implement a formal BPM discipline. The research describes the organisation's understanding of BPM and factors influencing its adoption. Qualitative research methods were used to collect rich narrative data from interviews with information systems (IS) and retail professionals. The BPM adoption themes that emerged focused on the understanding and education of BPM, cultural limitations, centralisation as a strategic driver, ERP as an enabler, structural and people factors. A theoretical model was developed to explain the themes and their inter-relationships. This empirical research provides a conceptual understanding of BPM and its adoption from professionals employed by the retail industry.

References

[1]
Alter, S. 2006. The Work System Method: Connecting People, Processes, and IT for Business Results, Work System Press, Larkspur, CA, USA
[2]
Al-Mashari, M. 2001. Process Orientation through Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP): A Review of Critical Issues. Knowledge and Process Management, 8, 3, 175--185.
[3]
Armistead, C., and Machin, S. 1997. Implications of business process management for operations management. International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 17, 9, 886--898.
[4]
Bandara, W.; Indulska, M.; Chong, S., and Sadiq, S. 2007. Major Issues in Business Process Management: An Expert Perspective. European Conference of Information Systems, 1240--1251.
[5]
Bucher, T., and Winter, R. 2009. Project Types of Business Process Management towards a scenario structure to Enable Situational Method Engineering for Business Process Management, Business Process Management Journal 15, 4): 548--568.
[6]
De Haes, S., and Van Grembergen, W. 2005. IT Governance Structures, Processes and Relational Mechanisms:Achieving IT/Business Alignment in a Major Belgian Financial Group. Proceedings of the 38th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 1--10. Hawaii: IEEE.
[7]
Department of Agriculture and Land Reform. 2008. Gross Domestic Product Contribution of Different Industries and Sectors towards GDP with reference to the Agricultural sector. Kimberly: Department of Agriculture and Land Reform.
[8]
Gartner Group. 2005. Delivering IT's Contribution: The 2005 CIO Agenda. Stamford, Connecticut: Gartner Inc.
[9]
Haese, M. D., and Van Huylenbroeck, G. 2005. The rise of supermarkets and changing expenditure patterns of poor rural households, a case study in the Transkei area of South Africa. Food Policy, 97--113.
[10]
Harmon, P. 2007. Business Process Change: A Guide for Business Managers and BPM and Six Sigma Professionals (Second Edition ed.). Burlington: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.
[11]
Hill, J.; Sinur, J.; Flint, D., and Melenovsky, M. J. 2006. Gartner's Position on Business Process Management. Gartner.
[12]
ITWeb.co.za. 2009. Pick n Pay implements world competitive solution. (2009, March 17) Retrieved from ITWeb: http://www.itweb.co.za/
[13]
Jarrar, Y.; Al-Mudimigh and Zairi, M. 2000. ERP Implementation critical success factors -- The role and impact of business process management. ICMIT, 122--127.
[14]
Kettinger, W, J. Teng, J, T, C. Guha, S. 1997. Business Process Change: A Study of Methodologies, Techniques, and Tools. MIS Quarterly, 21, 1, 55--80.
[15]
Ko, R. K. 2009. A Computer Scientist's Introductory Guide to Business Process Management. ACM, 15, 4, 11--18.
[16]
Ko, R. K.; Lee, S. S., and Wah Lee, E. 2009. Business Process Management (BPM) standards: A survey. Business Process Management Journal, 15, 5, 744--791.
[17]
Lee, R., and Dale, B. 1998. Business Process Management: A Review and Evaluation. Business Process Management Journal, 4, 3, 214--225.
[18]
Lewis, M., and Slack, N. 2003. Operations management: critical perspectives on business and management. London: Routledge.
[19]
Matavire, R., and Brown, I. 2008. Investigating the Use of Grounded Theory in Information Systems Research. Paper presented at the 2008 SAICSIT Annual Research, Wilderness South Africa.
[20]
Melenovsky, M. J., and Sinur, J. 2006. BPM Maturity Model Identifies Six Phases for Successful BPM Adoption. Gartner Group.
[21]
Mooney, L. 2008. Building a Business Case for BPM -- A Fast Path to Real Results, http://www.metastorm.com/solutions/solution_sheets/Metastorm_Whitepaper_Building_A_Business_Case_for_BPM_2009.pdf
[22]
Moore, M. 2005. Towards a confirmatory model of retail strategy types: an empirical test of miles and snows. Journal of Business Research, 696--704.
[23]
Myers, M. 1997. Qualitative Research in Information Systems. MIS Quarterly, 21, 2.
[24]
Myers, M., and Newman, M. 2007. The qualitative interview in IS research: Examining the craft. Information and Organization, 17, 2--26.
[25]
Pritchard, J.-P., and Armistead, C. 1999. Business process management - lessons from European business. Business Process Management Journal, 5, 1, 10--32.
[26]
Pertusa-Ortega, E. M.; Zaragoza-Sáeza, P., and Claver-Cortés, E. 2010. Can formalization, complexity, and centralization influence knowledge performance? Journal of Business Research, 63, 3, 310--320.
[27]
Rosemann, M., and de Bruin, T. 2005. Towards a Business Process Management Maturity Model. Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Information Systems, 1--12.
[28]
Seethamraju, R., and Marjanovic, O. 2009. The role of process knowledge in business process improvement methodology: a case study. Business Process Management Journal, 15, 6, 920--936.
[29]
Strauss, A., and Corbin, J. 1998. Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. California: SAGE Publications.
[30]
Teddlie, C., and Yu, F. 2007. Mixed Methods Sampling: A Typology With Examples. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 1, 77--100.
[31]
Thompson, G.; Seymour, L. F., and O'Donovan, B. 2009. Towards a BPM Success Model: An Analysis in South African Financial Services Organisation. BPMDS 2009 and EMMSAD 2009, 1--13.
[32]
Trkman, P. 2009. The Critical Success Factors of Business Process Management. International Journal of Information Management, 30, 2, 125--134.
[33]
Van der Aalst, W. M. P., ter Hofstede, A. H. M., and Weske, M. 2003. Business process management: a survey, Proceedings of the International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2003, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 26--27 June.
[34]
van der Aalst, W.; Reijers, H.; Weijters, v. D.; Alves de Medeiros, A.; Song, M., and Verbeek, H. 2007. Business Process Mining: An Industrial Application. 32, 5, 713.
[35]
Weatherspoon, D., and Reardon, T. 2003. The Rise of Supermarkets in Africa: Implications for Agrifood Systems and Rural Poor. Development Policy Review, 21, 3, 333--355.
[36]
Zairi, M. 1997. Business Process Management: A Boundaryless Approach to Modern Competitiveness. Business Process Management Journal, 68--80.

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Exploring factors that affect Business Process Management (BPM) adoption in South African State-Owned Enterprises2023 Conference on Information Communications Technology and Society (ICTAS)10.1109/ICTAS56421.2023.10082735(1-6)Online publication date: Mar-2023
  • (2022)Success determinants of projects of business software implementation: Research frameworkCroatian Regional Development Journal10.2478/crdj-2021-00102:2(1-16)Online publication date: 2-Feb-2022
  • (2021)Optimizing Player Management Processes in Sports: Translating Lessons from Healthcare Process Improvements to SportsInternational Journal of Computer Science in Sport10.2478/ijcss-2021-000820:2(119-146)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2021
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Business process management adoption: a case study of a South African supermarket retailer

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image ACM Other conferences
      SAICSIT '11: Proceedings of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists Conference on Knowledge, Innovation and Leadership in a Diverse, Multidisciplinary Environment
      October 2011
      352 pages
      ISBN:9781450308786
      DOI:10.1145/2072221
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

      Sponsors

      • University of Cape Town
      • SAICSIT: So. African Inst. Of Computer Scientists & Info Tecnologists

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 03 October 2011

      Permissions

      Request permissions for this article.

      Check for updates

      Author Tags

      1. BPM
      2. BPR
      3. South Africa
      4. business process
      5. retail

      Qualifiers

      • Research-article

      Conference

      SAICSIT '11
      Sponsor:
      • SAICSIT

      Acceptance Rates

      Overall Acceptance Rate 187 of 439 submissions, 43%

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • Downloads (Last 12 months)28
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2
      Reflects downloads up to 17 Feb 2025

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      Cited By

      View all
      • (2023)Exploring factors that affect Business Process Management (BPM) adoption in South African State-Owned Enterprises2023 Conference on Information Communications Technology and Society (ICTAS)10.1109/ICTAS56421.2023.10082735(1-6)Online publication date: Mar-2023
      • (2022)Success determinants of projects of business software implementation: Research frameworkCroatian Regional Development Journal10.2478/crdj-2021-00102:2(1-16)Online publication date: 2-Feb-2022
      • (2021)Optimizing Player Management Processes in Sports: Translating Lessons from Healthcare Process Improvements to SportsInternational Journal of Computer Science in Sport10.2478/ijcss-2021-000820:2(119-146)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2021
      • (2020)A Causal Mechanism Approach to Explain Business Process Adoption and Rejection PhenomenaBusiness Process Management Forum10.1007/978-3-030-58638-6_18(297-312)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2020
      • (2019)Radio Frequency Identification Implementation ChallengesProceedings of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists 201910.1145/3351108.3351140(1-10)Online publication date: 17-Sep-2019
      • (2015)Knowledge-intensive process management: a case study from the public sectorBaltic Journal of Management10.1108/BJM-10-2014-017010:4(456-477)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2015

      View Options

      Login options

      View options

      PDF

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      Figures

      Tables

      Media

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media