Business Process Modeling at Somewhere University

This assignment analyzes the current IT framework and business processes at Somewhere University. It highlights inefficiencies caused by separate accounting and purchasing departments, leading to increased costs and manual errors. The report utilizes Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) to map existing processes, identifying gaps and recommending reengineering for improved efficiency and effectiveness.

Running head: BUSINESS PROCESS MODELING
Business Process Modeling
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BUSINESS PROCESS MODELING
Executive Summary
The report reflects the business process of somewhere university. The university needs to
improve its business process in goods order placement and revive processes. It has been
identified that the university employees have to fill paper based forms and submit it to various
departments like financial, procurement and purchase. The process of order submission is
consisting of various protocols. The purchasing clerk handles most of the tasks of the order
placement. On the hand, the goods receipt clerk receives the goods and deliver it to the staff who
ordered the goods. There are various issues like no information present into the system regarding
order requisition status unless the receipt department update and many more.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction:................................................................................................................................3
2. Business Background and Assumptions:.....................................................................................3
3. Problems and Issues of Current Business:...................................................................................5
4. Conclusion:..................................................................................................................................6
Bibliography:...................................................................................................................................7
Appendices:.....................................................................................................................................8
As-Is Model:................................................................................................................................8
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1. Introduction:
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.
2. Business Background and Assumptions:
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.
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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.
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
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with the invoice then the payment is confirmed otherwise it is not. The payment is made only
after confirmation of three-way matching.
3. Problems and Issues of Current Business:
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.
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
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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.
4. 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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Bibliography:
Andrus, MR, Forrester, JB, Germain, KE & Eiland, LS 2015, ‘Accuracy of Pharmacy Benefit
Manager Medication Formularies in an Electronic Health Record System and the Epocrates
Mobile Application’, Journal of managed care & specialty pharmacy, vol. 21, no. 4, pp.281-286.
Bogdanas, D & Rosu, G 2015, ‘K-Java: a complete semantics of Java. ACM SIGPLAN Notices’,
vol. 50, no. 1, pp.445-456.
Enck, W, Gilbert, P, Han, S, Tendulkar, V, Chun, BG, Cox, LP, Jung, J, McDaniel, P & Sheth,
AN, 2014, ‘TaintDroid: an information-flow tracking system for realtime privacy monitoring on
smartphones’, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), vol. 32, no. 2, p.5.
Jeston, J & Nelis, J 2014, Business process management. Routledge.
Lacson, R, O'Connor, SD, Andriole, KP, Prevedello, LM & Khorasani, R, 2014, ‘Automated
critical test result notification system: architecture, design, and assessment of provider
satisfaction’, American Journal of Roentgenology, vol. 203, no. 5, pp.W491-W496.
Marinescu, P, Parry, C, Pomarole, M, Tian, Y, Tague, P & Papagiannis, I 2017, ‘IVD: Automatic
learning and enforcement of authorization rules in online social networks’, In Security and
Privacy (SP), 2017 IEEE Symposium, pp. 1094-110, IEEE.
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Appendices:
As-Is Model:
Figure 1: The BMPN Diagram of Somewhere University Process
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(Source: Created by Author)
Figure 2: Submit Request Subprocess
(Source: Created by Author)
Figure 3: Vendor Selection Subprocess
(Source: Created by Author)
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Figure 4: Purchase Order Generate Subprocess
(Source: Created by Author)
Figure 5: Order Acceptance Subprocess
(Source: Created by Author)
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Figure 6: Purchase Order Complete Subprocess
(Source: Created by Author)
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