COMESA has begun the process of re-engineering its business processes. Its objective is to redesign and modernize all the business processes at the Secretariat. The aim is to raise the business efficiency and effectiveness at all levels across the organization to enable optimal service delivery.
The exercise begun last week led by the African Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF) and will help to establish cost-effective and measurably more efficient set of business processes in COMESA. This will be through redesigning, and re-engineering of all business processes, and introducing new ones if necessary, for accomplishing COMESA mandate.
ACBF has worked with COMESA in past on capacity building and in 2019 conducted an organisational capacity assessment from which a recommendation was made to carry out a BPR exercise for the Secretariat. ACBF has also conducted a restructuring exercise for COMESA and is currently engaged in carrying a number of HR strengthening activities for the Secretariat.
The BPR exercise is expected to result in effective governance, efficient performance, and targeted development outcomes for public sector and transparent accountability mechanisms. Among them is to shift from a function-oriented work performance to a service-oriented performance; transit from output-based assessment to well defined outcome-based assessments; and move away from an ad-hoc piecemeal view of performance information to an integrated and holistic data-driven view.
The exercise will cover all divisions and units including the offices of the Executive Management. ACBF will support the Secretariat to identify both internal and external customers together with the services delivered to its customers.
The exercise will be conducted in five phases staring with the presentation of the inception report which was done on Thursday last week. The other phases will comprise of analysis of the current business process, identify process improvements, identify gaps and gaps-closing initiatives, and ultimately an implementation plan that includes Change Management.