Preliminary Study on Business Process Management (BPM) Practices: A Case Study of a South African State-Owned Enterprise

Abstract

In South Africa, State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are either owned or partially owned by the government and often act as catalysts for economic growth. SOEs are established to provide essential public services to the public and such services include water, electricity and transportation utilities. On the contrary, South African SOEs are often dysfunctional and victims of state capture resulting to poor service delivery. As a mitigation measure against corruption, many SOEs adopt Business Process Management (BPM). Across the globe, Over the years, SOEs are seen to invest substantial amounts of money on BPM and South African SOEs are no exception. BPM offers the SOEs a guide for structuring, managing, and controlling their business processes. However, literature on how BPM is practiced in South African SOEs is sparse. Hence, there is a need to describe how BPM is practiced in South African SOEs. This study used the grounded theory literature review method and only reports on open coding as this research is in progress. The findings showed twelve different ways in which BPM practiced in the SOE. It was found that in the SOE, BPM was practiced to optimize work, understand work and manage compliance. These practices were mostly mentioned and appeared to the most dominant ones. The theory developed in this study contributes to the understanding of how BPM is practiced in SOEs.