The Current APCO Problem Statement - Case Study Example

Management Information System - APCO Case Study Table of contents Introduction 3 Business strategy 3 1 The current APCO problem ment 3 1.2 Targeted state Wish list 4 2 Identifying the most important facts surrounding the case. 6 3 Defining alternative courses of action and choosing the right course of action. 7 4 Final conclusion 8 5 Bibliography: 10 Introduction APCO needs to modify its Information Systems to align to the new business strategy. Existing processes and systems are not sufficient to support business goals and are preventing the company from growing fast. New business processes coupled with new information systems which leverage the fast growing Internet channel will allow the company to meet its strategic goals for the future "The system must simplify and speed up the business processes in order to support the planned growth of the company, increase customer service, and reduce costs." That will allow the company to meet the target of ultimately having the customer to leave the dealership with the (APCO) contract in hand. 1 Business strategy 1.1 The current state APCO problem statement As a result of massive customer expansion, existing business processes and information systems were not keeping up and the following problems were faced. Dealer-customer applications for its policies and the submission of repair claims have become almost unmanageable as well as extremely costly A significant element of that problem is that APCO issues and administers hundreds of different policies to thousands of policyholders, each of which is complex. Different dealers offer different types and amounts of service in those contracts, and all customers must select the level and type of service they will pay for when they purchase the contracts. APCO faces many of the same problems with the thousands of private-label contracts it administers. 1.2 Targeted state Wish list The new business model and its matching information systems strategy needs to achieve the following: Ability to do approval and denial almost immediately and ultimately print the contract right back to the dealership and them print (it) out and have it signed, right there Start providing customers with coverage information that's more specific to whatever they purchased. It becomes more personalised and gives the customer more accurate information. Making the whole service contract process friendlier and quicker is one way to help gain more service customers because it should result in the sale of more of these contracts. The company wants to automate its entire application process to speed up everything for both APCO and its customers and to eliminate much of the reliance on paper documents. Extract the information as easily as possible, without a lot of IT over- head Use the Internet as a Channel to achieve the above goals Information systems and business strategy now align with each other to deliver Strategic information systems. Such systems deliver Computer system at any level of an organisation; changes goals, operations, products, services, or environmental relationships and helps organisation gain a competitive advantage The Internet is changing the role of information systems in organisations. The Internet is capable of dramatically reducing transaction and agency costs. Businesses are rapidly rebuilding some key business processes based on Internet technology. Internet technology becoming a key component of IT infrastructure. The need of the hour was to have a new Sales Management system and a Claims Processing System that would allow APCO to manage sales more efficiently and process claims with limited overheads and maximum efficiency and modify business processes to align to the new information processing systems. The systems need to use the Internet as a delivery channel to deliver maximum benefits to the new business processes structured around this channel. Both these above systems are Operational level systems. As a first step APCO wants to introduce a comprehensive electronic document- management (or content-management) system. The company wants the final content-management system to be highly automated so it can handle the whole process from the creation of all documents to the handling of an automobile purchaser's application for the insurance to final approval. The new system must decrease the amount of content APCO must handle by replacing its method of storing a separate document for each program and level of coverage. The new system should enable specific contracts to be assembled from many stored components, some of which will be unique to that particular document. However, most, if not all, of the components of the documents will be shared with many other contracts. The system will have to collect all the required components according to the rules for that particular program and state requirements. APCO is planning to use the Web to speed up the whole process and provide a new channel for enrolling and servicing customers and use Internet technology help it lower its (and dealers') costs. 2 Identifying the most important facts surrounding the case. Current day management goals are design competitive and effective systems, understand system requirements of global business environment and to create information architecture that supports organisation's goal. APCO needs to align its business strategy to meet these goals to successfully fulfil the companies' business goals. Therefore the company is now trying to align its information systems strategy to meet the goals defined in section 2.2 above and change business processes that would make information systems easier to implement and administer. The key issues that APCO needs to address to build such an information system are the following: Look at information systems and business goals as a single unified system Do a SWOT analysis on the current state of Information systems and its alignment to business strategy Define success factors and competitive forces Identify opportunities for improvement and change Obviously the management seems to have put some strategic thought on these lines for implementation of the new business strategy as envisioned in Section 2.2 3 Defining alternative courses of action and choosing the right course of action. The system is a set of interrelated components that must work together to achieve some common results. Key components of a system include characteristics like boundary, environment, inputs, outputs, components, interfaces and storage. Each component can be decomposed as a sub-system view. When an Information technology system needs to be defined, organisations are looked at as systems and People, Organisation structure; Technology and Business Tasks/procedures are the key components that make the organisation work. In the case of APCO, the need to build or buy the information system exists. Since this system has special business rules and processes unique to this industry, such a system needs to be built since a readymade system may not be available. The various steps in aligning the information system with the business goals will be as below: Identify business processes Business process redesign Information resources assessment Information vision and architecture - which would include usage of new channels like the Internet, moving away from flat files to databases and document centric applications and so forth Information resourcing plans Designing the architecture and its components Creating a long term and short terms Information systems plan based on this architecture and business goals. Implementation of new Information systems life cycle comprising of requirements, development, acceptance, implementation and production support either through internal or external development with a vendor. The strategic business plan and information systems plan should also have checks and balances to verify the effectiveness of the information system for the organisation and its users and the ability to meet business goals at the same time. 4 Final conclusion It is concluded that APCO is on the right track to improve its information systems aligned to its business needs and goals. To do so the company has certainly on the right path in defining a critical strategic plan for the business and therefore an implementation of the same as an information system. Once the high level strategy is made, it yields a new architecture including a document management system, which utilises the Internet as a medium to have better and quicker access to its customers and dealers. The document management system is the first of the revised information systems and can be a pilot to determine how information systems align to business needs. Floating the RFP and choosing a build/buy internal or external vendor would get the application completed as the requirements are fairly documented clearly. Therefore, this would lead to APCO's business strategy being realised as a technology implementation and would align to and meet business goals in the long run. 5 Bibliography: Clarke, R. eBusiness Home page [On-line] 2005 http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/, 06 Sep 2005 Laudon, K.C. & Laudon, J.P., Essentials of Management information Systems, 5th Edition Prentice Hall Martin, W., Brown, C., DeHayes, D., Hoffer, J., Perkins, W. Managing Information Technology - Third Edition Prentice Hall, New Jersey Chapter 9 pp 359-395 Basic Information System Concepts Wikipedia Definition of Management Information Systems [On-line] 2002 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_information_systems, 06 Sep. 2005. Read More