Redesigning Business Processes for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in Developing Country Contexts

For competitiveness, Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) need to adopt innovative business practices to deal with their challenges such as resource poverty, lack of business skills, and the volatile economic environment. Business process (BP) management (BPM) provides the transformational capabilities that can improve the performance and customer satisfaction for these enterprises. However, the extent of BPM adoption and process maturity among SMEs in developing countries is woefully low as these enterprises lack access to appropriate BP redesign methods. The research question is How can SMEs in a developing country context redesign their BPs? The Design Science research methodology is followed to achieve three main objectives as to (1) determine the requirements of SMEs for process redesign, (1) design a BP redesign approach for SMEs, and (3) validate the designed approach in SMEs. Preliminary results show that the environment of SMEs in developing countries is highly uncertain, and they require an agile, iterative and context sensitive BP redesign approach, which is not found in the literature. An agile BP Redesign Approach has been proposed and is being demonstrated and evaluated in selected SMEs. Here, we report on the requirements study and the proposed approach.