An Empirical study of the critical success factors for business process re-engineering (BPR) in the employees' provident fund

Abstract

The Employees' Provident Fund (EPF) is an organization to which Sri Lankan private sector and semi-government employees contribute a percentage of their monthly income and the employer contributes a percentage of employees monthly income throughout the employees working career. The administrative aspect of the fund is handled by the Department of Labour, whilst the management of the fund is handled by the EPF department of the Central Bank. The total amount contributed with the accrued interest is reimburse to EPF member qualified to claim as per the section 23 of the EPF Act. Statistics of the EPF revealed that there are 7000 - 8000 applications received per month by the Labour Department from the members for EPF withdrawals. The EPF IT enabling project was launched covering the EPF refund section in 1998 n order to improve staff productivity and provide a more effective service to its principal clients the employees who call over at the head office of the department or its sub offices island wide. Until the year 1998, all EPF claims were handled by the Management Assistants manually. Now all existing member records are computerized and all manual procedures of record retrieval are supposedly abandoned. The Management Assistants and Staff Officers have been provided personal computers with on-line data retrieval facilities from the central employees' master database as well as the Central Bank member accounts' database in a networked environment. However, the trade unionists and members still complain about the delay of their EPF claims. There are complaints about mal- practices in various claim units in district offices. Although claim flies are handled by the computer system and a large amount of records are retrieved electronically, the record keeping staff still retrieves member records manually leading to corruption in the system. This research study is focused on identifying the problems of existing IT enabling systems of the EPF with the intention of making suggestions for a member centric solution for the EPF refund system.