MITS5507 Business Process Management.pdf
MITS5507 Business Process Management Case Study Assignment April 2020 Objective(s) The objective of this assignment is to apply the knowledge and experience acquired with BPMN diagrams and Business Process Management concepts gained through the lectures and activities to a simulated industry Case Study Problem. You will need to employ analytical skills for this Case Study to discover existing problems and re-design the business processes. INSTRUCTIONS Your task is to model, analyze, re-design and automate the processes for the company case study attached to this assignment (Scenario contained within this document). A narrative description of the “as is” process is given in the case study below. You must take this description as the basis to analyze the process, identify improvement alternatives and to design a to- be process. If you find that the description below is not detailed enough, you can make your own assumptions. But any assumptions must be reasonable and documented. The first step is to understand the “as is” process model. To this end, you are asked to design a detailed BPMN process model reflecting the current state of the process. This BPMN model should not only deal with the “normal course” of action, but it should also show how different types of errors or exceptions are handled, including changes, cancellations and over-due invoices. Next, you should identify wastes in the process as well as major issues. The latter should be assessed and documented in an issue register. The “issue register” should include the following columns: Issue Priority Number, Issue Name, Short Description, Data/Assumptions, Quantitative Impact and Qualitative Impact. The issue register should not be an inventory of every possible issue you can think of. Instead, you should focus on major issues that capture the concerns expressed by the customers, staff and management stakeholders. Based on the identified issues, you should then design a “to-be” process model in BPMN and explain what changes you are proposing and how would these changes address the identified issues, and/or how they would contribute to achieving the company’s strategic goals. Submission Guidelines All submissions are to be submitted through turn-it-in. Drop-boxes linked to turn-it-in will be set up in the Unit of Study Moodle account. Assignments not submitted through these dropboxes will not be considered. Submissions must be made by the due date and time (which will be in the session detailed above) and determined by your Unit coordinator. Submissions made after the due date and time will be penalized at the rate of 10% per day (including weekend days). The turn-it-in similarity score will be used in determining the level if any of plagiarism. Turnit-in will check conference web-sites, Journal articles, the Web and your own class member submissions for plagiarism. You can see your turn-it-in similarity score when you submit your assignment to the appropriate drop-box. If this is a concern you will have a chance to change your assignment and re- submit. However, re-submission is only allowed prior to the submission due date and time. After the due date and time have elapsed you cannot make re-submissions and you will have to live with the similarity score as there will be no chance for changing. Thus, plan early and submit early to take advantage of this feature. You can make multiple submissions, but please remember we only see the last submission, and the date and time you submitted will be taken from that submission. Your document should be a word or pdf document containing the following sections: 1. An executive summary 2. The “as-is” process model 3. Waste analysis 4. Issue register 5. A description of changes you suggests making to the “as is” process. For each proposed change, you should explain why you suggest that change, and which issue(s) it would help to solve, or how would the change help to address the company’s goals 6. The “to-be” process model 7. A cost analysis of the difference between the two models, including any assumptions you have made to do this. 8. “as-is” and “to-be” Signavio BPMN diagrams Scientific General Consulting Case Study Scientific General Consulting (SGC) is a small business in Melbourne's West, which was established in January of 2012 and currently operates from an office in the Footscray area, Emily Hoordoor is the owner of the business and she has four permanent employees. Her business provides coaching to individuals and organisations in areas of teamwork, leadership and personal performance coaching. The coaching is conducted by Emily and a team of coaches who work on a session by session basis. The other coaches operate as subcontractors. SGC started as a home-based business with Emily as sole operator. Originally, most of Emily’s work came from recommendations from other consulting agencies and associates. Some of her work also came through her LinkedIn account. The amount of work grew to the point that Emily could not handle it all by herself and she would sometimes have to recruit other coaches to take on or help her with some of the work. Seeing an opportunity, the Scientific General Consulting business was begun and has blossomed ever since. A website was created as well as a Facebook presence. The business has grown to the point that she is now providing work to other coaches through her business on a regular basis. There is roughly a 50:50 split between one-to-one work where a coach deals with one person at a time and group sessions, where a company might, for example, run a teamwork workshop for several of its employees simultaneously. Over time, Emily hired a full-time receptionist and personal assistant. There is a part time bookkeeper to manage the accounts. Later, she hired a “coaching administrator” on a part time basis. His job was to coordinate the work required amongst clients and the coaches when coaching requests came in. A client relations manager deals directly with clients and coaches in the organisation and follow up of coaching sessions. SGC has a basic website which describes the business and its coaching services, a page with the main people and coaches involved with SGC, testimonials from happy clients and a “Contact us” page for enquiries. The website is not the main source of attracting business and possibly lacks the polish and finesse that one would expect from a professional quality website. Organisational structure, culture and strategies Scientific General Consulting (SGC)’s goals are socially and educationally driven. They want to help those in need through understanding the needs of those that they wish to support in training. They also have a genuine desire to improve their clients’ career opportunities and professional standards. At SGC, the great majority of employees believe that the organisation demonstrates high levels of trust, care, recognition and support amongst members. Within groups in the organisation, people feel that they have flexibility, good opportunities to participate and that they can express their opinions freely. Overall , people are friendly, committed to the organisation and there is good teamwork within groups. Individuals appear to be motivated towards innovation. The organic organisational form, as described by Burns and Stalker (1961), is a structure which is appropriate to dealing with rapidly changing conditions. SGC, being a coaching service provider, is highly governed by regulatory authorities. However, it can be seen that the company operates in an organic structure, based on the following characteristics (Burns & Stalker, 1961): • Fluid, adaptable, and open to change. • specialised job functions. • Few management layers. • Decision making is not centralised to management • Minimal ‘micro-management’ of employees By organising itself in this way, SGC benefits from free flows of information, decentralised authority whereby employees are able to participate in decision making activities, and a highly adaptable, dynamic environment (Chimoriya, 2015). One of the main problems within the organization is that the organic structure can be a disadvantage to SGC, by way of increasing the complexity of decision making by expecting input from many individuals, creating an unpredictable and unstructured working arrangement, and incurring higher administration costs by diversifying specialisations in job functions (Chimoriya, 2015). Particularly, the size of the business is becoming larger. Increased training requirements lead them to hire more employees and more collaboration with their partners. Another problem is the business processes structure and management. Sometimes, the process(es) are controlled and managed repetitively by various staff. Occasionally, this can take too long to organize jobs and decreases the customer satisfaction in the long term. To be able to manage the increasing complexity of the business requirements, leading to increased stakeholder satisfaction, the management need to consider their current business process(es)’ efficiencies (such as reduce waste and cost, better utilise resources…). The interdependent strategy with structure relationships can impact an organisation’s performance (Tian 2012). Before undertaking significant process restructuring, the changes must be assessed to ensure they fit with the business goals and strategic direction. Two of SGC strategies for 2020 are as follows: 1. Focus on reducing costs and job cycle time, which increases operational productivity – allocating the right coach to the appropriate customer who requires services of both low cost and short cycle time. 2. Continued growth in SGC earnings, supported by improved customer, coach and partners satisfaction. The challenge While in the past business processes tended to change only slowly over time, it is now firmly held by Emily and her management team that SGC must be able to adapt and improve their processes more rapidly over time. The terms “agile” and “agile development” have now become common terminology within the management team to reflect the idea that the organisation must rapidly adapt as needed to any future changes. However, they have been aware that making changes to the way the procedures are handled can lead to many problems if these changes are not considered in the context of the overall business. Since the inception of the company, the growth of staff and sales have led to increasingly complex procedures and it is difficult for Emily to find the time to fully document these. Additionally, Emily has realized that she lacks the skills necessary to do this in a way that would result