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Business process re‐engineering (BPR) is certainly one of the latest buzzwords and is the subject of great interest and also great controversy. Organizations need to shake themselves out of complacency to close competitive gaps and achieve superior performance standards ‐ the reason why many have embarked on huge BPR projects. In view of the high risks associated with radical change, there are, however, many problems associated with BPR. For some BPR is going off the rails before it is properly understood, and many BPR exercises are not delivering the goods. Sometimes, organizations are expecting “quick fixes”, thus displaying their lack of understanding of a complex system. It is unreasonable to expect quick results when so much change is involved, especially when these business processes involve not only machines, but also people. Many believe, such as Mumford, that the management of change is the largest task in re‐engineering. Many people perceive re‐engineering as a threat to both their methods and their jobs. Owing to this recognition, many authors concentrate on the need to take account of the human side of re‐engineering, in particular the management of organizational change.

The purpose of this study is to explore the perceptions of Afghan female engineers regarding opportunities and barriers to starting their own engineering/construction company in Kabul through three career trajectory chokepoints related to training through higher education, the engineering workplace and entrepreneurship, through the lens of feminist theory.

Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted. A Web-based survey was also conducted to collect data from participants who were not able to participate in the in-depth interviews. Thematic content analysis was used to analyze the collected data.

As a result of the analysis, three main themes were developed related to “chokepoints” that Afghan female engineers face along the path to starting their own construction companies: “entering and studying engineering,” “career development” and “starting her own engineering business”; the authors address the subthemes of barriers and opportunities confronted by Afghan women at each chokepoint.

Due to civil unrest, the authors are only able to reach a sample of Afghan female engineers working in the capital city of Kabul.

Afghanistan shows, perhaps, the most severe underrepresentation of female engineers of all countries in the world, yet no research gives them a voice to explain the challenges their face to starting their own engineering/construction businesses. The authors are able to report their perceptions and articulate recommendations to encourage female entrepreneurship in the engineering/construction sector in Afghanistan.

Afghan women face significant barriers to having meaningful careers in the science, technology, engineering and medicine professions. The findings provide information for regulators regarding why Afghan women do not start their own engineering firms.

As physical security and resource constraints generate difficulty in accessing Afghan women in general, this is the first paper to report the perceptions of Afghan female engineers regarding the barriers and opportunities they perceive on the path to engineering entrepreneurship.

Achieving more from less is a preoccupation of many organizations in the turbulent 1990s. Midst the maelstrom of apparently mutually exclusive organizational objectives, managers respond to what may turn out to be the siren call of business process re‐engineering. Rapid assimilation of business process re‐engineering into managerial practice in the 1990s is arresting. However, a number of articles on the subject have been based on hyperbole rather than evidence. Considers and examines theoretical antecedents of business process re‐engineering within the context of this decade’s challenges. Uses empirical evidence to provide evidence‐based critical success factors for business process re‐engineering programmes. Discusses indications for future research in business process re‐engineering. Places emphasis on the need to bridge the lacuna between business process re‐engineering theory and evidence‐based practice.

The central purpose of this study is to investigate the relative effects of leadership styles, i.e. transactional leadership and transformational leadership, and achievement motivation on the entrepreneurial potential of MBA and engineering students. This study also examines whether the MBA and engineering students differ in terms of their entrepreneurial potential.

This study has used a cross-sectional research design along with a quasi-experimental research method to investigate the study's objectives on a sample consisting of 952 engineering and business students. The study has also used the PLS-SEM approach to carry out the data analysis, and to evaluate the group differences among MBA and engineering students concerning the relationships investigated, i.e. leadership motivation-entrepreneurial potential, and achievement motivation-entrepreneurial potential.

This research has primarily made four findings. First, the study has found that there are statistically significant differences between students pursuing a business education, and those students who are seeking management education about their entrepreneurial potential. Second, this study demonstrates that leadership and achievement motivation are strongly associated with entrepreneurial potential. Third, this research shows that the achievement motivation-entrepreneurial potential is more substantial among engineering students than among business students. However, the leadership-entrepreneurial potential relationship is more influential among MBA students than among engineering students. Lastly, the effect size of leadership is small in comparison with the effect size of achievement motivation, which is substantially healthy.

This research has attempted to address the riddle of a leadership attribution error in the context of entrepreneurship. Accordingly, this study has demonstrated that the idea of leadership attribution error has empirical evidence in the context of entrepreneurship also. Further, this study has tried to address the “behavior-motive preeminence” dichotomy. The results of this research show that internal motivation is more reliable than external leadership behavior in cultivating the entrepreneurial potential of students.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze the benefits of the application of a requirements engineering framework to assist Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) development. This framework combines the technology-driven and the process-driven approaches for requirements analysis and implementation. Specific business process modeling methods enhance the framework and assist the formulation of the functional specifications of the ERP system and the management of requirements.

A case study strategy was chosen as the most appropriate method to answer the research question and test the theoretical propositions. The case study’s unit of analysis is a Greek manufacturing company and its ERP implementation project. A requirements engineering framework enhanced with business process modeling methods was applied and the results were evaluated using metrics for ERP implementation success. Data were collected using multiple sources of evidences, including interviews with various stakeholders, structured questionnaires, direct observations, vendors’ functionality papers and company’s documentation.

This study proves that the configuration of ERP’s reference models together with the adjustments of organization’s processes, provided through a structured requirements engineering framework can lead to reliable functional specifications, a smooth transition to an ERP system and, eventually, to successful ERP implementation, concerning its alignment with requirements.

A single case study is conducted in a typical manufacturing company, providing opportunities for further research in other industries, testing in parallel well-defined requirements and other success factors for ERP implementation.

The paper fulfils the identified needs for applied methodologies and frameworks for requirements engineering which can assist successful ERP implementations.

This special “Anbar Abstracts” issue of Work Study is split into six sections covering abstracts under the following headings: Operational research and statistics; Project management, method study and work measurement; Business process re‐engineering; Design of work; Performance, productivity and motivation; Stock control and supply chain management.

Business process re‐engineering (BPR), a management tool that initially advocated a revolution in the way businesses are driven, now carries the stigma of being a major cause of job elimination. This study reveals the depth of involvement of BPR practitioners in what, advocates claim, are the fundamental ingredients of BPR – business processes. The data alert the reader to the different understandings and practices related to business process analysis held by several UK and Brazilian companies. Possible reasons are given, accounting for why some of the companies investigated seemed to lose a BPR focus in favour of more urgent restructuring matters. The authors conclude that companies often lack a basic awareness of the business process concept, and that misconceptions about these issues can lead to unrealised expectations at various levels in the organization.

Notes that as we move towards an information‐based society, information technologies will play a key role in establishing and maintaining economic competitiveness and that while the systems development life cycle approach has brought some order to the software development process, information engineering brings additional structure to the process. Points out that re‐engineering techniques are used to align every area of the enterprise: people, strategy, technology and business processes. Describes software re‐engineering activities and processes with a special emphasis on developing and maintaining quality systems.

The purpose of this study is to test the impact of entrepreneurship education on business, engineering and arts and science students using the theory of planned behaviour. The study adopted a pre-test–post-test (time 1, t₁ and time 2, t₂) to measure the change of attitudes and intentions over a period of six months. The participants who took entrepreneurship as a compulsory or elective course within their curriculum are 450 in total. To measure attitude, the subjective norm and perceived behavioural control, the study adopted a measure proposed by Kolvereid (1996b). For the intention to become self-employed, the study adopted a three-item measure of career intention, proposed by Kolvereid (1996b), which captures the intention of an individual to start a business. The results showed that the post-programme mean values of subjective norm, attitude towards self-employment, perceived behavioural control and intention towards self-employment increased in relation to the pre-programme ones. But the mean difference value in all four variables is higher for business students when compared to the other two student groups. Also, t-tests indicated no significant differences between respondents and “incomplete” non-respondents (students who filled the t₁ questionnaire but failed to respond at t₂).

The study adopted a pre-test–post-test (time 1, t₁ and time 2, t₂) to measure the change of attitudes and intentions over a period of six months – one semester. A convenient sample technique has been used. The participants who took entrepreneurship as a compulsory or elective course within their curriculum are 450 in total – 100 (Bharathidasan University, Trichy) from business, 100 (National Institute of Technology, Trichy) from engineering and 250 (Bharathidasan University, Trichy) from art and science). The total 250 arts and science students were selected from four reputed art and science colleges in India where entrepreneurship course is offered either as compulsory or elective course, and due share of 60 was given to each college where the total number of students in the final year was 1,000 to 1,500 in each college. The 100 engineering students were selected from one reputed engineering college where the total number of final year students was 750. Finally, 100 business students were selected from two reputed business schools where the number of final year students was 600. All the students from arts and science and engineering were soon-to-graduate undergraduates and business students were soon-to-graduate postgraduates. It was clearly explained to the surveyed students that the questionnaires were for research purposes only, participation was voluntary and their views would not affect their grades. Both time 1 (t₁) and time 2 (t₂) questionnaires were reviewed by three academics and five non-participating students to ensure clarity of wording and face validity of the constructs.

The overall response rate was 55.3 per cent. The mean and standard deviation of variables, attitude towards self-employment, subjective norm, perceived behavioural control and intention towards self-employment for the samples of business students, engineering students and arts and science students are presented in . To test the hypothesis, the present study used the following tests: Correlation (Tables III-V) and regression (Table VI) to test the relationship between attitudes and intention at t₁ and t₂. To test the effect of the programme on the change of attitudes and intentions, the current study used one-way ANOVA on the difference scores (for sample of business, engineering and arts and science) with the group membership (programme) as the independent variable. The “difference scores” method is preferable to split-plot repeated measures ANOVA for pre-test–post-test designs, because it gives equivalent results in a simpler and less confusing way (Girden, 1992). No significant violations of the assumptions for t-test, repeated measured ANOVA and regression were identified. Specifically, the common problem of multicollinearity was not evident for all the three majors of students, as the correlations between independent variables were moderate and the tolerance values were all higher than 0.70 for business group, 0.72 for engineering group and 0.73 for arts and science group.

The study aimed to address the attitudes and intentions among business, engineering students and art and science students, but not actual behaviour, and therefore, the study echoes the suggestion that longitudinal studies following the subjects for years after graduation are the only way to prove with accuracy the intention–behaviour link (Kolvereid, 1996b). The study is a comparative study on the effect of entrepreneurship education through the Azjen’s theory of planned behaviour on the scores of variable attitudes towards self-employment, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control and intention towards self-employment and has not made any attempt to find out the causes for such scores.

Using the theory of planned behaviour, the study tested the impact of entrepreneurship education on business, engineering and arts and science students. The study adopted a pre-test–post-test (time 1, t₁ and time 2, t₂) to measure the change of attitudes and intentions over a period of six months. The participants who took entrepreneurship as a compulsory or elective course within their curriculum are in total 450. To measure attitude, the subjective norm and perceived behavioural control, the study adopted a measure proposed by Kolvereid (1996b). For the intention of becoming self-employed, the study adopted a three-item measure of career intention, proposed by Kolvereid (1996b), which captures the intention of an individual to start a business. The results showed that the post-programme mean values of subjective norm, attitude towards self-employment, perceived behavioural control and intention towards self-employment increased in relation to the pre-programme ones. But the mean difference value in all four variables is higher for business students when compared to the other two student groups.

This special “Anbar Abstracts” issue of Industrial Management & Data Systems is split into six sections covering abstracts under the following headings: Industrial Management; Industrial Engineering and Work Study; Industrial Design; Quality Management; Manufacturing Strategy and Production; Information Systems.