Business Process Assignment Analysing Organisational Structure of ABC University

Question

Task: Your business process assignment report should be no more than 1500 words +/-10%, and it should:

• Describe the organisation, its structure and culture and how these impacts on their processes and process re-design projects;
• Analyse the current business process (s) by considering all the key issues/problems listed, and select THREE which you consider to be the most essential to resolve and discuss why these issues/problems need to be addressed. What are some of the opportunities if the problems/issues are addressed? Any assumptions?Any limitations? The detailed suggested changes will be addressed specifically in the Part 3.

Answer

Organisational structure
ABC University is a Melbourne based public research university. The university explored in the present context of business process assignment offers courses in both higher education as well as technical and further education. The university has been around for around 50 years and has been helping for about 20,000 students. There has been a recent rise in the number of staff members and students. The hierarchical structure of the university is designed to keep everyone working as per his or her department. The university is headed by the council and immediately followed by the vice chancellor of the university. All departments are set under the vice chancellor. The departments consists of clerks who do all the work related to their department. The availability of a department head helps in keeping the workflow of the department at check. This structure would not hinder in the process of designing of the new system for the university. This has forced the management of the university to reorder their business processes, which has been followed until now so that they are able to cater to everyone’s needs easily. They have decided to increase their emphasis of the implementation of proper business process management across their university. This would help in their development of the infrastructure as well the processes, which are followed by the university. This report has been designed to discuss about the newly implemented business process for the process of acquisition of materials, services and equipment’s by the university. The designed system has been found to have certain drawbacks, which have been discussed in the following section. Since the system has been newly implemented and the issues have been identified at an earlier stage, they can be easily changed as per the requirement of the university.

Analysis of business process
The current system as discussed shows the minimal use of enterprise system of the university. The employee who requires materials or equipment has to be delivered needs to wait for the acknowledgement from two departments who do not share information among themselves. Most of the work is done with the help of paper work and it has been seen that the paper work is delayed at one or more levels. Safekeeping of the documents used for the requisition is also important. However, in current electronic world use of paper based information sharing process is out dated. The enterprise system can be updated for the process of making everything work electronically. This would help save up a lot of time and help in clearing out more orders than before. Even the process of payment requires more time than usual, which makes the university, miss the special early bird discounts from the vendors. The discounts would surely help the university with their accounts issues. The financial year ending problem with the enterprise system may lead to cancelled purchase orders. Any purchase orders with no invoice from the vendor is cancelled. The main drawback of the university is that they have given more focus of the fact that an order might be cancelled or the process of getting acknowledgement from different departments. This makes the system flawed.

Recommendation
Since the business process has been analysed after the implementation, there have been found to be a number of issues regarding the system. Most of the issues have been found due to the process of acknowledgement sharing among the departments of the university. The orders are shared with the concerned department, and then the department to let them know about the receipt shares an acknowledgement. This process takes time and requires the use of lot of paper work to be shared among the department. The order details can be shared with the concerned department and the employee at the same time over the use of enterprise system. The employee has to check the details instantly and provide the feedback. There is no dedicated clerk for the types of orders coming from the employees.

If a clerk has a positive relation with a vendor and would also be able to get the product delivered faster along with a discount, then the system should be designed so that the product requisitions are shared with the concerned clerk of the purchase department. This would help in saving of time as well as money for the university. Similarly training the clerks in the knowledge about the instruments and products being ordered would help in making of proper decision during the time of placing of order. Though not everyone can be trained in every department requirement, however, clerk can be employed based on his or her knowledge of the product or a department. Prioritizing the orders based on the requirement in the university can help in the process of fast tracking the collection process. There should be fast tracking of orders smaller in quantity as well as consisting of meagre stationary items. This would help in the processing of important requisitions faster for the university.

The employee only gets to know about the details of the product being delivered after the product receipt has been shared with the employee on successful delivery. The employee can check the product once the vendor delivers it and provide a feedback on the same. The employee can also check the product details when the product order is being placed. This would help in keeping the relation between the vendor and the university better. The vendor would not have to take the delivered product back if some small things has been found to be mismatched with the requisition.

Implementation of electronic requisition system for the employees to place orders over the enterprise system would help in understanding the product required by them easily. Processing of things electronically help in fast tracking, many smaller tasks in the system designed. The acknowledgements can be easily collected from the user’s respective accounts. Many works are delayed because there is a collection of multiple acknowledgements. Moreover, not everyone is informed about the acknowledgement sharing between two parties. This can also help in making changes as per the joint confirmation of requisitions. The university can also start using process for placing of order of products through the vendor’s online portal. This would help in having much higher discounts as well provide the university with guaranteed products from the vendors. Guarantee from the vendors ensure the safe delivery of the products to the university. However, the university needs to grant a credit card to the accounts department for prepaying of the orders being placed.

Prepaying of the orders comes with additional discount and guarantee from the vendors.
The university needs to change their focus on the successful acquisition methods rather than having failed-order handling cases. Proper follow-up with the vendors, sharing of required information among the departments through the enterprise system can help the university to provide much better service to the employees. The checking of required information can be completed with the help of enterprise system rather than sending of notification to different departments.

Limitations
In order to follow all the above provided recommendations the following limitations has been considered:

1. Large database needs to be available with proper entity relations
2. Credit card with credit limit of up to 1/4th percentage of the annual budget for the university is present.
3. Proper information shared among the required departments.
4. Time management of the orders along with follow up.
5. Employees of the procurement department is trained on the different equipment’s required by the various departments.

Keeping in mind the above limitations the recommendations has been suggested. However looking into the management of the university, the limitations set forward need not be held as a drawback for the implementation of the new system. The new system would be able to help the employees as well as the department to process the requisition process faster and with much more efficiency.