Lessons learnt from process improvement in a non-profit organisation

Abstract

Non-profit organisations (NPOs) have to increase the effectiveness of their services/products and acquire satisfaction of their stakeholders. This aim can be achieved by improving their business processes and enable them by information and communication technology. Business processes improvement (BPI) is well known in for-profit organisations and achieved successful results, and NPOs should take it into consideration. But this concept in NPOs is not extensively applied and case studies on how NPOs should manage their process are required. This case study explains how to apply successful BPI in Astan, a NPO with more than '65' personnel and '5,000' unit of properties which running in the Iran real estate industry. During four months by series of actions which is taken by processes owners we identify, analyse and improve their business processes. Our results show that, NPOs due to high centralisation and bureaucratic structure, suffering from inefficient processes and ad hoc/innovative methods for improvement are highly needed.