Introduction to Business Process Management

The business process management is refers to the discipline within management in terms of operations that utilizes several techniques for discovering, analyzing, modeling, optimizing, automating, measuring and improving business process. The integral part of business process management is business process modeling that is carried out for visualizing the process of a business in order to evaluate the present process to further modify it if possible. The business process on the other hand, is the management strategy of business processes. This reengineering process is actually the evaluation part that produce the outcome of gaps in the current that can be filled to improve business.

The report is based on the case study of Somewhere University. The university is looking forward to modify it business process to provide better teaching sessions to its twenty thousand students. As per the intention of reengineering the business process, it is required to generate a BPMN model based on current process and a model that reflects the combination of process after completion of reengineering activity. The description of the organization background and assumptions is significant for modeling the current process. The problems indicates the direction in which the process reengineering must be heading.

The employees of somewhere university, regardless of position administrative or academic, must be contacting with the university to purchase materials, equipment and services on their behalf. In order to that a specific process must be followed by the employees. The organization has been running for fifty years. The main purpose of the university is providing education to the students. The organization at present handles the education of twenty thousand students. The university management team is recently conducting meetings to discuss the proposal of increasing the importance of Business Process Management. The direct impact of the positive outcome of the proposal can be seen on the student education service and staff support. If the business process management is improved, the student service will be of high level and the employees will be getting quality support and various benefits.  The business process reengineering for somewhere university is a complex and lengthy task the initiatives that will be taken have to be university wide.

The staff collects a form and fill it with all the required information. The form is needed to be signed by the applicant. The form is consisted of the details like service or goods required, approximate cost of product, delivery date, quality and supplier (not mandatory). The purchase requisition can also be submitted with quotes provided by vendors. The photocopies of the forms are provided to the financial manager and procurement manager for analysis. If both of them finds the request valid then only the form will be considered as valid and submitted to the purchase department. Often the quotes gets expired and the purchase clerk has to register the vendor into the system. Then the quote is entered into the system and order is placed. The staff makes additional copies of the form in case it is lost or damaged. In case the employees did not mention any vendor the purchase clerk select a vendor from the master vendor list that is stored in the system. The purchase clerk will provide electronic purchase order form to specific vendors and for other vendors hardcopy or fax is used. All these types of forms has the single purpose of placing orders to the vendors successfully.

Case study of Somewhere University

Goods receive department always receive the goods. At the time of receiving the goods, the staff at the goods department retrieves the order details that is associated with the delivery of goods. The goods are returned to the supplier if the order of purchase is not available in the system. The same staff of goods receive department is responsible for checking the quantity and quality of the delivered goods.  In case any defect is found on the products, the purchase order is cancelled. The goods are returned to the vendor and the accounts payable department is informed. The staff who ordered the products also gets a notification of the cancellation. As the order is cancelled, the accounts payable office will not be paying any charge for the order. On the other hand, if the order is approved it is provided to the staff department via parcel or internal mail service. The staff has to collect the goods from the department by dropping a mail to the department. After the receiving of product by the staff, the goods receipt clerk will be updating the order status in system and the accounts payable office will get the information.

The university receives the invoices from the vendors against the order, often the invoice is provided with the goods and sometimes separately. The account payable office, regardless of the invoice sending procedure, gest the invoice. It is even possible that the invoice is provided to accounts payable office even before the goods has been delivered. If the purchase order matches with the invoice then the payment is confirmed otherwise it is not. The payment is made only after confirmation of three-way matching. 

The goods that has been asked by the staff is significant for education but it is not always possible to gather confirmation from both the financial and procurement manager. If either of the manager rejects the order, the order requisition is rejected no matter what is the reviews of the other manager. The goods that are not costly such as a hundred dollar product is less than the pay that has to be made to the managers. This way the financial resource of the university is wasted. The current process is not able to handle this issue as it needs to be authorized independently. The constant pressure on the goods receipt department for cutting cost has made the staff to cut to the bone. No alterations are made to most of the goods that enters this department. The staff has reported various time that the products they receive is damaged or have some kind of defect. This means that the goods receive department is accepting unsatisfactory products as a result of improper checking. The department is making delays in sending the products to the staff through goods receipt department is consuming valuable time of the university.

Purchase process at Somewhere University

The staff of somewhere university is not equipped with credit card number. Thu they are not able to purchase products from online vendors as the vendors does not accept delay in payment. Implementing a credit card allowance to the employee can be tricky task various policies has to be implemented that must satisfy university predefined protocols. The purchase clerk does not have any information of the product order status it is updated by the goods receipt department. Another way is contacting with the goods received department over the telephone. Thus the purchase order clerk is not able to inform the staff about the status of the order properly all the time. Even the employees have to contact with the goods receipt department to find out whether ay staff there has received the product or not. Most of the thing is based on paper work and having multiple copies of the form is not possible, especially in case of emergency. The paper based forms can be easily damaged or get lost. This can hamper the effect of making payment as the accounts payable department need all the order requisition related form and information to make the payment. Even if the staff provide the photocopy, all these paper base work is time consuming. If the vendor is not able to provide the order within agreed deadline order is cancelled by the goods receipt department. The delay in checking the order delivery date is constantly making issues regarding proper delivery of item. The need of few products expires before the product reaches the department of the employee. The organization does not store the data of the bulk order. The organization does not have any specific decision making process for supporting business.

The Degree Warehouse Institute and somewhere university has separate accounting and purchasing departments thus leading to extra cost to the staff and more manual errors in the system. Often it has been observed that one campus does excessive work while the other is doing nothing.

Conclusion:

The study concludes that the IT framework of somewhere university is not sufficient to support the organization wide processes. The whole business process is required to be changed. The report concludes that the travelers does not have their data. The business process modeling has been done according to the current business process of somewhere university. The organization has taken a good initiative but the process of completing the task is not sufficient to support business. The business process reengineering is a crucial process to improve the current business circumstances. The BMPN modeling has been a great method for mapping and understanding the business process of somewhere university. Based on the output of problem analysis, the gaps in the current business process have been identified. 

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