Report
Table of Contents
Solution of Klassic Grocer with the help of EPC diagram 2
Solution of Do-It-Right company using BPMN 5
Importance of business process engineering 7
Evaluation of business process management 7
Figure 2: Business process modelling 6
Introduction
An organisation’s outcome is the reflection of strength in the business process management and engineering. During business process engineering, an organisation studies the current process and develops new processes so that operational cost can be minimised and efficiency and productivity can be increased. Business process management is a discipline to improve the business process through continuous analysis, modelling, enhancement and monitoring. The presented report will discuss the business context of two organisations namely Klassic Grocers and Do-it-right. It will discuss the business scenario for both organisations and create event-driven process control diagram and business process modelling notation for the organisations. It will discuss how an organisation has importance of business process engineering to ensure cost-effectiveness, productivity and reliability in the operations. It will present examples from industries how they have improved their business process to meet standardisation and drive out the competitive advantages. It will evaluate the business process management in both organisations along to discuss benefits, limitations and potential enhancements to consider in practice.
A business process is a composition of several tasks and workflows. For a business, fulfilment of the order, update of the associated accounts and databases, approval of invoice and onboarding of the new employees are some examples of a business process. In business process, organisations have aim to improve insights, efficiency and order of the collective workflows so that there is elimination of ad hoc workflows and chaos in the process. It can be considered as a continuous improvement process because each business process has scope for optimisation with changes in the implementation technology and parameters.
Klassic Grocers
The organisation runs an online grocery service and it provides home delivery of the items purchased through the website. It is providing services to the recertified customers. Certified customers are those who have provided a credit line and rent a refrigerator unit to store the delivered items. Once an order is placed, the organisation provides a digital receipt to the customers. During an order processing, the system needs information such as customer identification number, name and list of the items to purchase along with quantity and quality. The system verifies with the database that the customer is managing a good credit line and the customer has a refrigerator at home. Order database is used to log the order once it is approved and an acknowledgement is shared with the customers using email service. Customer is also notified the placed order is not processed in the organisation due to any of the reason including decreased customer credit line.
Warehouse and delivery functions are working in coordination to serve the customers. In office, there is a clerk who manages the orders. If there are outstanding orders, a ticket is generated for such orders and then order is assembled, packed and recorded in the system. From warehouse to delivery, there is monitoring of the packet to ensure effective delivery. At delivery side, there is a delivery person who reads the barcode and manage the sales order information with the database. At this stage, box is checked again for the required items and then it is loaded for the delivery to end-customers. Once the box is delivered to the customer, delivery man confirms the delivery and related details are managed in the order database. Customer database is also updated to manage billing process and ensure that transactions are recorded for future purpose.
Solution of Klassic Grocer with the help of EPC diagram
The organisation wants to understand how the business process is working so that the potential area of the improvement can be identified and addressed. Therefore, event-driven process chain is a potential solution to map the business process for engineering perspective. Event-driven process chain looks like a flow chart and it is useful to configure the resource planning execution and business process improvement in the organisation (Al-Rakhami and Almashari, 2019). It has values to deliver benefit of autonomous workflow instance when work is shared among multiple resources as examined in the same of Klassic Grocers where multiple resources such as deliveryman, clerks and others are working in a coordination to process the order.
Event-driven process chain is used for the organisation to map the business process. There are mainly three reasons to recommend the solution. First, it is an ordered graph so that the business process components such as functions and events can be mapped easily. Second, there is use of the connectors so that it is easy to represent the parallel and alternative processes in the business (Amjad et al., 2018). Third, there is use of the logical operators that seems good to use in the context of the organisation. Therefore, EPC is a significant solution for the organisation to engage management and other non-technical resources to understand the business process.
Presented EPC diagram indicates how the order process is managed in the organisation. According to the diagram, the process mainly starts once the order is placed by the customer. The system validates the order against the profile of the customer on the system. For instance, order is verified for the customer credit profile and rent of the refrigerator to meet the requirement. Later, decision is made whether to place the order or not. If order is placed, a receipt is generated for all the listed items. There is also access to the customer data to make further decisions. For new customers, it is also validated that the customer has credit line and refrigerated unit at home. Customer is informed for decisions on the order and for that, an email is sent to the customer. All the approved orders are logged properly in the database and customer is acknowledged for status of the order. The organisational resources check the outstanding orders and execute the process to prepare the order. It may include activities such as assembly of the customer order items, selection of the box and record of the order. A barcode is also placed outside the box to track the product across the supply chain. A cross-check process is used at delivery department and deliveryman has role to confirm the delivery of the product through subsequent actions on the system.
It is identified that the organisation has effective use of EPC to present the business process. This solution helps to engage the stakeholders such as managers and leaders who are generally not technical to understand the implementation of business process through diagrams (Fajar, 2019). Simple and easy-to-use diagram helps to achieve participation of all resources toward identification of the improvements and /or execution of the process.
DO-It-Right Company
It is a wholesale distributor for the furniture, especially for the officers. The organisation receives the customer orders in a mailroom and clerks have responsibility to sort the orders from other emails. Once the emails are sorted, the clerk groups the orders into batches so that similar orders can be processed at once. For each batch, clerk prepares a transmittal sheet and it is forwarded to order department. This transmittal sheet is used to validate if an order is complete or not. For all the complete orders, batches are added and batch control log is used to control order process. There is a use of the computer system in which clerk logs the orders and keying process includes two-steps for entry. That two-steps are significant to determine whether an order is logged properly or not. In most of the cases, when customer is not new to the business, the customer data is fetched from the disk. There is validation of the credit record of the customer to decide the order approval. On successful validation of the customer data, the clerk keys in the rest of the order. This process creates a new entry for the sales order event data store and from that, sales department fetches the detail. At the end of each day, all the data is processed against inventory records and customer data and on that basis, there is creation of a ticket to pick up the products. Customer acknowledgement and sales order notifications are also used to inform the required department and customers. At the same time, sales order is also recorded for future use in the sales order database.
The picking ticket has importance in warehouse because it is used to assemble the customer orders. The orders are then forwarded to the shipping department that removes the notification attached by sales order team. Here, products are compared with the picking ticket and sales order notification. Clerk has role to keys the order number for shipping department. Later, shipping department access the master data and shows the order on the shipping screen. In this manner, the customer data and order-related records are managed and accessed throughout the operation.
Solution of Do-It-Right company using BPMN
The organisation can use business process modelling notation as primary solution to demonstrate the business process. It is identified that there is need of the changes in the operations and resources when considering modification and implementation of a business strategy through the business process. It is examined that the resources generally resist the changes and therefore, the rules, resources and processes may face issues for replacement with new solutions (Kocbek et al., 2015). Business process modelling is significant to ensure that the organisational resources such as executives and managers are consistency with the processes and there is complete insight on the business process. It has importance to ensure that the business activities and tasks are assisting the business to meet the strategic goals. If the business processes and approaches are not meeting, there is possible risk of the failure in the execution. If the operational tasks are performed correctly, the organisational goals may not be achieved due to lack of adherence to business process (Medoh and Telukdarie, 2017). Therefore, business process modelling allows to present how various activities and processes are interconnected to deliver the intended outcomes.
Business process modelling is significant to identify the potential improvements in the existing business process through in-depth analysis of the inefficiencies and bottleneck issues. The organisation can enjoy process agility and ability to make changes in business process while quickly communicating with the relevant resources (von Rosing et al., 2015).
Figure 2: Business process modelling
The presented business process modelling notation indicates that the organisation has mainly five functions including ware and sales order and there is communication and coordination among the departments to accomplish the customer order effectively. There is use of various types of the notations to present the data storage, activities, data transmissions from one activity to another and decision-making in the transmission. There is also label on each communication to indicate what is purpose behind the sharing of the information. Therefore, the business process modelling diagram is showing that the organisational process for completion of the order is effective. It has systematic flow of the information from one department to another. However, there are several weaknesses in the business process considering the current business expectations and activities. For instance, the business process has repetitive activities and data storages. There is rapid verification with the computer system for the customer profile and therefore, it creates an impact on the performance. Further, there is high risk of the information duplication between sales order department and order entry department.
Importance of business process engineering
Business process engineering is critical for an organisation because it allows to understand how the business process is contributing in the organisational goals and how it can be updated to meet the requirements. It is identified that enhancement in the business process can result in improvement in customer service quality and target cost on the business operations can be reduced (Laguna and Marklund, 2018). Business process engineering is a complex process as it may involve multiple resources from the business environment but it becomes easy when the organisations are moving with standard tools and techniques to ensure participation of the others.
It allows the organisations to redesign and shape the business process so that the cross-functional teams can work together with identification of the improvements. It helps to deliver optimised business process for maximum outcome and values. In addition to this, business processing engineering has role to make decision-making better and effective through the use of data dissemination (Van Der Aalst et al., 2016). If a business process modelling is used in a proper way there is scope for an organisation to deploy quality customer services and generate more values from the process.
Evaluation of business process management
In the given case studies, it is determined that the organisations have importance of the business process management. From the case study of Klassic Grocer, it is examined that the business process is straightforward and it is easy to understand. However, Do-it-right company has complex business process because of inclusion of the multiple department and activities. Klassic grocers have limited number of departments who are not interconnected to verify the transactions and processing and therefore, the process become straightforward and customers can enjoy faster deliveries. In the context of Do-it-right, it is determined that business process is managed as a function of a department and therefore, there are complexities in data and process management. For instance, there is repetitive activities in the process and minimum reuse of the existing documents and lists (Chang, 2016). It creates barrier in performance and efficiency because multiple storage is required to access and verify for the order processing.
However, there are some similarities in both cases. Both processes are order fulfilment processes and they are starting from the customer orders. Klassic Grocer is fetching the orders using a system so that there is automation of the order placement process. There is no need of the clerk to manage the emails, sort the emails and create batches. It is effective when assuming that most of the orders are different in requirement (Rosemann and Brocke, 2015). For a big organisation and Do-it-right company, batches are created to ensure that all the orders of similar types are processed at once. It helps to improve the performance when orders have high similarly so that periodic batches require a smaller number of the resources. However, mailroom can be eliminated from the process to add values such as automation and accuracy.
Critical evaluation
It is examined that the business process of the Do-it-right company is comprehensive and accurate as there is minimum scope for the loss of the data and inefficiencies at department level. There is cross-checking with other departments to ensure that the quality of the customer service is high. However, it does not offer instant execution of the orders because batches are created to accomplish the orders. It is costly for the business when there is a unique order that does not match with other batches. In the context of Klassic Grocer, it is examined that the process is simple and it is performing necessary cross-validations to meet the requirements.
From the perspective of the technology, business process modelling notation is useful for Do-it-right company because the organisation wants to map the current business process toward identification of the new business process (Rosemann and Brocke, 2015). It is evaluated that the organisation may have some data duplication issues because of frequent check of the data. In case of Klassic Grocer, it is evaluated that the organisation may face issue of loss of data and poor customer services because failure of a single activity can cause impact on the customer services.
Conclusion
The report has concluded that business process modelling is important aspect to identify the potential scope for improvement. It is concluded that the both organisations have some positive as well as negative points regarding the selection of the business process for order management. The report also concluded that the organisation has importance of the business process management and engineering toward optimised outcome.
References
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Chang, J.F., 2016. Business process management systems: strategy and implementation. Auerbach Publications.
Fajar, A.N., 2019, July. Event Driven Process Analysis at Retail Company. In 2019 12th International Conference on Information & Communication Technology and System (ICTS) (pp. 32-36). IEEE.
Kocbek, M., Jošt, G., Heričko, M. and Polančič, G., 2015. Business process model and notation: The current state of affairs. Computer Science and Information Systems, 12(2), pp.509-539.
Laguna, M. and Marklund, J., 2018. Business process modeling, simulation and design. Chapman and Hall/CRC.
Medoh, C. and Telukdarie, A., 2017, December. Business process modelling tool selection: A review. In 2017 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM) (pp. 524-528). IEEE.
Rosemann, M. and Brocke, J.V., 2015. The six core elements of business process management. In Handbook on business process management 1 (pp. 105-122). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Van Der Aalst, W.M., La Rosa, M. and Santoro, F.M., 2016. Business process management. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 58(1), pp.1-6.
von Rosing, M., White, S., Cummins, F. and de Man, H., 2015. Business Process Model and Notation-BPMN.
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