QUALITATIVE RESEARCH APPROACH OF CRITICAL FACTORS FOR SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS PROCESS REENGINEERING IMPLEMENTATION Hartini Ahmad, PhD., Department of Business Administration, Faculty of Business Management, Universiti Utara Malaysia, 06010 UUM Sintok, Kedah, Malaysia. hartini@uum.edu.my Abstract: This paper demonstrates the use of qualitative research methods to analyse business process reengineering (BPR) implementation in Private Higher Education Institutions (PHEIs) in Malaysia. We embarked on a case study to explore in-depth three organisations’ experiences with radical process change, namely BPR for the purpose of discovering how they achieved success. The factors are teamwork and quality culture, quality management system and satisfactory rewards, change management, less bureaucratic and participative, IT/ IS, project management and adequate financial resources. This paper highlights that the choice of research approach depends on the particular research setting and context, which is appropriate for the researcher to answer research questions and to deal with research problems. The qualitative research approach refers to how data are collected and analysed, and the type of generalisation derived from the data. Data is the basis for the construction of reality data, and are the basic ingredients for building knowledge. The qualitative interviews generated the data, which enabled us to establish the critical success factors of BPR by using the Decision Explorer software. The qualitative research approach will guide the reader through the process of data collection and analysis as intended here. Keywords: business process reengineering, critical success factors, qualitative, Decision Explorer. 1. INTRODUCTION Radical process change initiatives have been called by various names such as process innovation, business process redesign, business process management, business process benchmarking, and core process redesign (Davenport, 1993a); however, they have different characteristics in terms of the degree of change (radical or incremental), the scope of exercise (internal or external), and the potential risks and benefits (Childe, Maull, & Bennett, 1994; Homa, 1995; Towill, 2001). It could be noticed that this approach is different from other business practices like TQM, continuous improvement, organisational learning or organisational development. It is found that the obvious point on which BPR differs from other approaches, is its ‘radical’ nature. A commonly known definition of BPR is given by Hammer & Champy (1993), as “…the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed”. Many studies, (such as Ascari, Rock, & Dutta, 1995; Bhatt, 2000; Childe et al., 1994; Homa, 1995), have used this definition in their work. Based on it, BPR practice is a process-focused and radical approach which is connected to the organisational strategy. This process-focus, as stated by Homa (1995), is much related to continuous improvement, or kaizen in the Japanese approach. Kaizen is defined by Imai (1986) as a long-term and long-lasting improvement resulting from team efforts focused on processes. This approach calls for a total