Identifying Control Factors for Business Process Improvement in Telecom Sector Using Taguchi Approach

Business Process Improvement (BPI) projects open avenues of success for organizations in this highly competitive era. However, most of these projects are not completed due to various reasons identified in past studies making it an area of active research. Using the Taguchi method, this paper identifies industry relevant factors that are most critical to success of a BPI Project in the Telecom sector. Data collected from business process managers and teams was used in evaluating the factors that significantly affect BPI project success through Taguchi Method. The experimental results and findings enable the managers of Telecom organizations to conduct successful BPI projects by guiding them about the factors that are determined to be highly critical to success. Vision, skills, resources, incentives and action plan were determined as critical factors that lead the BPI project towards success. The primary contribution of this research is the proposed methodology and the design of experiment based on the Taguchi Method to determine levels of critical factors in the services sector where this has limited application as compared to the manufacturing industry. The practical implications of this research relate to providing concise directions to ensure success of BPI Projects in the Telecom sector prior to execution of the project. A significant contribution of the research is its practicability in implementation across different industries.