CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Most Nigerian Public Sector Organizations have disappointed a vast majority of Nigerians. These organizations, especially those that provide power and energy have provided very poor services in the country. The operating costs and debts of these organizations have risen dramatically that they have sparked a nationwide call for restructure or re-engineering.
Most public sector organizations have large number of employees, the Power Holding Company of Nigerian (PHCN) currently has 50,000 workers, while the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) workforce is slightly lower, whose jobs would be threatened, and should these organizations fail. There is therefore the need to find a lasting solution to the aliments or failures of these public sector organizations as to forestall an unemployment crisis, a debt crisis, and ever increasing operating costs. This solution may lie in reengineering these organizations. (www.phcnonline.com)
Reengineering known as business process reengineering (BPR) is “the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business process to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, services and speed”. (Hammer and Champy 1993:32).
As conceived, it means tossing aside old system starting over by going back to the beginning and inventing a better way of doing work. Its proponents emphasize the words, fundamental, radical, dramatic, and process. The message here is simple and straight forward, businesses must struggle to discard habits and traditions, those scarce and cherished walls of large, corporate entities that have transformed them into centralized bureaucracies, creating layers and layers of management over time, and which in turn symbolize the production of layers and layers of corporate rules, procedures and manuals. What had resulted in less flexibility and adaptability and therefore less capacity for competition against small, lean and aggressive niche competitors engaged in predatory market offensive (Hammer and Champy 1993:3).
In some ways, reengineering appears to be a reincarnation of Taylor’s scientific management model, which aspired to employ scientific and empirical methods in understanding work at the shop room level. (Taylor, 1911) Taylor’s use of time and motion studies advanced the principles of understanding the work process to eliminate stages that cause wastage and fatigue among workers in the shop room. Reengineering would do the same thing except that it advocates the more radical prescription of discarding old process and starting a new. (www.phcnonline.com).
Consequently, it is not difficult to understand why reengineering has captured the imagination of practitioners and business owners, it offers an opportunity to make policy makers take another fresh look at the logic and rationale of these rules and regulations, opening possibilities of discarding old ways of doing business. This is significant because through the years, much attention has been given to the agenda of reforming the public sector organizations and appraises their poor performance to make them viable to provide services that they were statutorily established to provide for Nigerians. (Danilo R. Reyes: 2000).
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