Document and Workflow Management - Report Example

Document and Workflow Management Student’s Name College Instructor’s Name Course Name: Executive Summary This reports indicates that in BPMN diagrams order entry/sales process starts when a customer enquiries and places an order of a certain product. This triggers the sales department together with accounts department to update both the inventory and sales nature. The customer is notified of receipt of the order and the action thereafter. The credit department or billing department are notified of an order by the customer where they are required to carry out credit worthiness of the customer as well as recommends the discount to be offered to the customer. The order is processed and goods send to the customer. During thee sending the shipping note is prepared which is sent to the customer and copy to the credit or accounts department. It must be accompanied by a copy of the invoice, bill of lading, packing slip and delivery note. From this analysis it is clear that for sales process to be complete, customer information current and past, stock file, marketing information and sales information are integrated to produce BPMN diagrams. TABLE OF CONTENTS Executive Summary 2 2 BPM and Strategy 7 Conclusion 10 Bibliography 11 Order Entry/Sales (OE/S) Process In the Order Entry/Sales Process has many activities and documents which involves many parties. The activities include pre-sales activities, sales order processing, picking and packing the goods and shipping. The customer enquires whether the product is available from sales department who in turn verifies product availability from the stores department/ stock file. The customer is notified of the availability of the stock where the customer makes an order. Immediately the customer makes an order the sales department notifies the credit department with a request of credit approval for the customer. Then the credit departments check the details of the customer in terms of his creditworthiness and approval of credit to the customer. The approval of the credit is notified to sales department who in turn informs the customer the position of the order and credit approval. The same is communicated to the shipping department and warehouse department for preparation for completion of the order. The warehouse and sales department will be involved in adding price information of the products that have been ordered by customer including the discount. The warehouse/store department will be responsible for updating the stocks records by allocating stock to the customer’s order. At the same time they will update records to indicate the order has been assigned sock thus completing the order. BPMN diagram for the described business process, From the diagram below, we can note that there are a number of activities, massages, events, and processes that are necessary to provide information for BPMN diagram. At the begging the customer places an order which prompts the sales and inventory department access the inventory file to ascertain the availability of the products in stock and update the marketing data immediately. The marketing data is update with the information of the order. When the stock is not in store according to the diagram, a placement is made for manufacture or the customer is notified about the position if the goods are no longer part and parcel of the merchandise of the company. When the order is accepted, the customer file is accessed to determine the customer‘s name, his credit worthiness and his current credit with the company. These activities are done in conjunction with other files like accounts receivable and sales order file. A customer is given credit once it found out that he has not exceeded his credit limit and the processing of the completion of the order is done. The customer may peak the goods after being supplied with the picking ticket or the order is shipped. When the order is being shipped, the goods are packed and the packing notification is prepared which will accompany the goods and a copy sent to the accounts department for updating of the records. When a picking ticket is prepared, it is aimed at assisting the customer to collect the goods from the warehouse or be used in shipping where if it does not match with the actual goods, it is corrected to indicate proper goods shipped. Its final stage is at the issuing of shipping notification. The shipping notification is very important because it is used to compare the sales information file and the actual goods shipped so that the customer can be notified as well the stock information file is updated. This leads to the production of a packing slip and bill lading. Bill of lading protects the owner of the goods as it a contract between the carrier and the shipping company. The packing slip is important as it will assist the carrier to identify the owner of the goods as well as the contents of the goods is carrying. This documents will be used by the accounts departments to prepare a bill that will be sent to the customer. CPN diagram In this case BPMN diagram has been converted into Petri net by coverting activities events, massage into Petri net transitions. The diagram that has been drawn for CPN is as shown below. From the diagram its clearly indicated that the order is received and the next action is to accept or reject the order. Once the order is rejected, no action is taken. Once the order is accepted, the goods are checked in store and an action for fulfilling the order begins or requesting for manufacture. Once the order is sent to manufacture, production begins where products are made ready and taken into the process of availing the products. Shipment of goods becomes the next activity of the order which is followed by payments. Reachability graph BPM and Strategy Business process management is a strategic move that is aimed at satisfying all the needs of clients in a business. BPM promotes the efficiency and effectiveness of the employees in an organization and it enables the fast realization of the set goals. BPM changes the organizational culture in an enterprise, preparing the minds of the employees to be able to go through regular changes in the organization as they work towards realizing the vision of their organization (Abdi, Zarei, Vaisya & Parvin, 2011, p. 149). It involves improving the efficiency of production and delivery in an organization by integrating innovation with the available resources. An organization should opt for BPM in order to enhance its performance in customer service, production quality and quantity, and save time in delivering its products. The transition should oversee the addition of value to the entire company (sobrinho, Gattaz & Pacheco, 2011, p. 91). It should result to very effective work force and happy satisfied customers. A BPM approach for the organization will take the company through a series of value added changes that will increase the production level of the company as well as the profit margins due to an increase in sales. The organizational culture in the company needs to be transformed in order to place the company’s financial performance at a better place (Dextras-Gauthier & Alain, 2012, p. 84). Application of the six BPM phases in the company will take it to a higher performance level in terms of efficiency and production. These phases include planning, analysis, designing, modeling, measurement and control processes, and transformation of the organization. In an organization that strongly upholds business process management; the six phases keep repeating themselves as the company adjusts to regular change in the business world (Ruzevicius, Milinaviciute & Klimus, 2012, p. 72). The company needs to adopt the strategy in order to keep rising in the future. A BPM will help the company both externally and internally. Externally, BPM helps a company to attract more customers due to the quality of the products it sells and the time efficiency that the company portrays in the delivery of the customers’ demands. When customers are satisfied with the goods and services provided to them, they always come back for more products and they spread a good word for the company they buy from (Fjermestad, Romano & Nicholas, 2006, p. 2). Internally, the BPM strategy will enhance the relationship between the employees and this will boost team work within the work place. It will ease the management process and influence coordination between the employees (Jan & Lukas, 2010, p. 10). A company requires a complete transformation of the current organizational culture whereby the employees work on individual terms instead of working as a unit to achieve the goals of the company. Once the cultural structure of the organization is changed, the company will increase its productivity and the value of the annual profits. They should incorporate the BPM strategy with the value chain concept to ensure that the profit margins develop an increasing trend over the years in the future. Value chains are the various activities in the organization that are conducted in the production. These are the steps through which a single product undergoes in the production and sale process that influence the value of the product (Tallon, 2011, p. 3). A strategic change in the value chain may reduce the total amount of money required for the production of a product while increasing the end value of the product (Sonteya, Seymour & Willoughby, 2012, p. 44). It is important that the company analyzes its current value chain to come up with a value chain that adds the most value to the finished product. The most feasible value chain is one that does not require a lot of input in terms of assets and funds but it generates a high value for the product. Regular value chain analysis will enable the company to reduce on its liabilities to enhance its competitiveness in the market (Oyson, 2011, p. 103). It is important for the company to come up with viable business process architecture. This will help in drawing of the business process architecture that highlights the strategic view of the organization. The architecture provides a pictorial view of the hierarchy in the organization and the step wise representation of the processes involved in the production to enable the manager to analyze the efficiency of the company (Versteeg & Bouwman, 2006, p. 95). Different business process architecture representations give different production results due to the application of varying disciplines. Having business process architecture makes it easy for the manager to allocate duties to the human assets according to their varying competence level to produce the highest level of efficiency in the company. The ‘To be’ process of the company will be time oriented, whereby all the processes from the customer order of the product to the delivery point will take the least time possible. There should not be any delays in the delivery of orders and if there is any, the company will compensate the customers. This will help to maintain a good relationship with the customers. The customer needs will be put first in every decision making by the management. The key aspect in the proposed solution is to oversee a fast and smooth organizational change with an efficient management process. This is aimed at helping the company to regain its high profit margins (Van de Ven & Sun, 2011, p. 60). Conclusion The documentation provided above supports the implementation of the BPMN. Through the process of normalization, the verification of data has been carried out and only relevant fields are incorporated in the tables, there are no duplication of fields in the database and no duplicate keys. The validation process has been taken care of through restriction on the type of data entered. For example, in customer name only characters can be entered when you specify the field type as character BPMN diagrams are an important factor that is used by companies today to help business operators gain the most effective market influence that they are interested in getting. Reaching the most number of clients from all over the globe through effective connections is a strong source of confidence for business organizations such. Applying the plans that are presented in this paper is the preliminary step that could be taken by the company into consideration; still, advancement and innovation is continuously suggested for establishment of efficiency for the company’s BPMN. Bibliography Abdi, N, Zarei, B, Vaisya, J & Parvin, B 2011, ‘Innovation Models and Business Process Redesign’, international Business & Management, vol. 3, no. 2, 147-152. Carton, AM & Cummings, JN 2012, ‘A Theory of Subgroups in Work Teams’, Academy of Management Review, vol. 37, no. 3, 441-470.  Dextras-Gauthier, JM & Alain HV 2012, ‘Organizational culture, work organization conditions, and mental health: A proposed integration’, International Journal of Stress Management, vol. 19, no. 2, 81-104. Fjermestad, J, Romano Jr. & Nicholas, C 2006, ‘Customer Relationship Management: Satisfying the Customer’, Journal of Information Science & Technology, vol. 3, no. 2, 1-3. Grant, AM 2012, ‘Leading with Meaning: Beneficiary Contact, Prosocial Impact, and the Performance Effects of Transformational Leadership’, Academy of Management Journal, vol. 55, no. 2, 458-476. Henry, W LH 2012, ‘Managers' Perception of the Orientation of Organizations: A Case Study of a State Government Agency in Australia’, Interdisciplinary Journal of Contemporary Research in Business, vol. 3, no. 11, 16-30. Hoppe, HC & Lehmann-Grube, U 2008, ‘Price Competition in Markets with Customer Testing: The Captive Customer Effect’, Economic Theory, Vol. 35, No. 3, 497-521. Jan, Z & Lukas, T 2010, ‘Simulation and its purpose in implementing of Business Process Management’, Advances in Management, vol. 3, no. 3, 9-12. Kumar, SS, 2012, ‘Challenges of Managing an Organizational Change’, Advantages in Management, vol. 5, no. 4, 13-15. Michael, B 2012, ‘The Importance of Effective and Efficient Team Work in an Organization’, Advances in Management, vol. 5, no. 3, 21-23. Oyson, MJ 2011, ‘Internationalisation of value chain activities of small firms: An international value chain approach’, Small Enterprise Research, vol. 18, no. 2, 100- 118. Ruzevicius, J, Milinaviciute, I & Klimas, D 2012, ‘Peculiarities of the Business Process Management Lifecycle at Different Maturity Levels: The Banking Sector's Case’, Issues of Business & Law, vol. 4, no. 1, 69-85. Sadeghi, A & Pihie, Z AL 2012, ‘Transformational Leadership and Its Predictive Effects on Leadership Effectiveness’, International Journal of Business & Social Science, vol.3, no. 7, 186-197. Sanders, NR 2007, ‘The Benefits Of Using E-Business Technology: The Supplier Perspective’, Journal of Business Logistics, vol. 28, no. 2, 177-207. Sobrinho, FG, Gattaz, CC & Pacheco, OI 2011, ‘A Value Based Business Process Management Network Model’, Journal of Integrated Design & Process Science, vol. 15, no. 4, 85-94. Sonteya, T, Seymour, L & Willoughby, K 2012, ‘Towards an Understanding of the Business Process Analyst: An Analysis of Competencies’, Journal of Information Technology Education, vol. 11, no. 1, 43-63. Tallon, PP 2011, ‘Value Chain Linkages and the Spillover Effects of Strategic Information Technology Alignment: A Process-Level View’, Journal of Management Information Systems, vol. 28, no. 3, 1-44. Van de Ven, AH & Sun, K 2011, ‘Breakdowns in Implementing Models of Organization Change’, Academy of Management Perspectives, vol.25, no. 3, 58-74. Versteeg, G & Bouwman, H 2006, ‘Business Architecture: A new paradigm to relate business strategy to ICT’, Information Systems Frontiers, vol.8, no. 2, 91–102. Read More