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Compostwiz Pty Ltd - Business Process Management - Report Writing Assignment Help
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The departmental directors are named in their respective function boxes in the chart. The number of employees working under each director is shown in each of the function boxes respectively (numbers of employees in each department include the directors of those departments). The sales function is also charged with marketing and service responsibilities; service requests though are usually referred to the logistics department. The accounting function is also charged with finance responsibilities. The production function manufactures the Compostwiz and manages the warehouse. The firm has a centralised IT function which provides some of the firm’s IT needs. Compostwiz Pty Ltd currently employs 50 individuals, including Jenny.
The business experienced strong growth in its first few years and this enabled it to grow quickly. In 2017 things started to change. Sales were down and profits reduced (see profit table below). This decline continued through 2018. The Chinese economy continued to exhibit volatility and the separation of the UK from the EU continues to impact economies around the globe. Innovation and client responsiveness are seen as imperative for long term sustainability.
Sales of the Compostwiz essentially relied upon word of mouth communication and a solid marketing strategy had not been developed at all. Worse still, Jenny had never put much time or effort into developing streamlined and computer based business processes and rather, resorted to many paper based manual methods to get things done, including purchasing material, controlling production, satisfying customer orders and managing all the accounts.
Jenny’s business strategy has always centred on innovation and up to this point, nobody had been able to produce a comparable device that could compete with the Compostwiz thus giving her a sizeable competitive advantage.
She underpins this strategy with a focus on quality and customer responsiveness. She also realises that, given a recent rise in customer complaints about delays in receiving orders, her firm’s customer responsiveness is waning and needs redress. Jenny wishes to maintain her strategic stance but knows that organisational change must occur urgently if it is to work as intended.
Jenny decided to hold a meeting with her directors. They assembled during the morning around the board room table where Jenny asked “What happens when a customer places an order for a Compostwiz?” (Jenny’s question assumed that the group would understand that a customer might be a wholesale or retail customer or an individual purchasing directly from the company either online (via eBay) or via phone or fax. Compostwiz Pty Ltd does not have a retail store front).
Bette spoke up and said, “well, we write up a sales order form and send it to production.” Mike said, “when we get to the sales order form, usually within three days, we physically check to see if there is a Compostwiz (or number of Compostwizs) in stock that suits the configuration required and if there is, we pack it, label it and write stock details onto the sales form and send it over to Greg’s guys to ship it out and we also send a duplicate copy to John so he can organise the accounts. We keep a triplicate in a box in my office – one day I will sort through these and complete a reconciliation. I also keep ‘post it’ notes of sales orders on my office whiteboard – these usually match the triplicates in the box so I don’t need to fiddle with the papers in the box.” When the box is full, we send it to John in Accounting.
Then Greg said, “well, when we get the sales order from Bette, we sign it and make notations of the date and time, then, when we pack the order onto one of the trucks for local delivery or get Fedex to collect it for interstate or international delivery, we forward the sales order along with a shipping note to John in accounting. We don’t know what he does with it but we’ve always done this. We keep a photocopy of the shipping note in a ring binder in the warehouse office.
When the photocopier is broken we just slap a ‘post it’ note on the order in the folder. This seems to work well because we don’t lose the details for many orders”.
Then John spoke up and said, “when we receive the sales order from Bette we file it and wait for the shipping order to come in from Greg. We usually cross check all sales orders and shipping orders that are sitting on our desks every day to ascertain whether an invoice action can be taken. When we see a sales order and a shipping order for the same sale (which we ascertain by looking at the name of the customer on the order), we send the customer an invoice to the customer’s address, either their shipping or head office address – it doesn’t really matter, we just choose whichever address appears first on the order. Payment terms are net 14 days and the majority of our customers pay within this time which means that there is very little action required in following up debtors.”
Jenny sighed quietly to herself and then asked, “well, what happens if we haven’t got any suitable Compostwizs in stock?” Mike said, “well, when we get the sales order from Bette and check for suitable stock, if we find that we’ve run out, we organise a purchase request and send it to Jake so that we can get the necessary materials to make more. It only takes us a few days to get the purchase request organised and sent.” Jake then spoke up and said, “when we get the purchase request from Mike, we file it for action so that purchase requests are tended to in order of date received. That’s how we prioritise things in my department!
When we finally find time to get to the request, we study it and then organise purchase order forms which we complete and send to our respective suppliers. We send these in the surface mail. It usually takes about four and a half weeks before we receive dispatch confirmations and invoices from our suppliers indicating that our orders have been filled and sent. Then we send the original invoices from our suppliers, with a payment order, to John so that he can organise payment for the materials. Our job is done!” John then said, “when we receive the invoices and payment orders from Jake, we pay these immediately. We’d hate to ruin our relationships with our suppliers.”
Jenny sensed tensions between members of the group. She particularly noticed a strong three way tension between Mike, Jake and John. Bette seemed to be the most positive member of the group, even though sales were down, and whenever she spoke, Jenny noticed that all other members of the group became anxious.
Jenny was beginning to see the consequences of her neglect of the firm’s business processes and sensed that if all of this were to continue, she could be out of business within a couple of years or even sooner. She is confident that the Compostwiz can adapt to changing times and will remain very popular for many years to come but she knows that she must match this fantastic product with excellent business processes.
Jenny engages your BPM consulting firm to help make sense of the current organisational approach and to provide some preliminary advice about redesigning processes so that the current downward trend in performance can be reversed. She gives you the transcript of her meeting with her directors (as seen above). She also provides you with some other basic information that she quickly gathered together for you including some Balance Sheet items (to help you to form a view of the firm’s position to invest in change) and some other miscellaneous information which might help you to determine the extent of change necessary. No other information is available to you to develop a solution. Jenny states that she has at least been conscious of accumulating some cash reserves for the firm’s development and that it seems the day has come to use some (or possibly all) of these! All of this is revealed in the tables shown below.
Your task is to prepare a preliminary business report for the CEO. The main body of your report must be structured using the following headings. A brief about what each section of the report must address is also provided.
BPM and Strategy
Business Process Management Assignment Help
Task: Overview of Compostwiz Pty Ltd Jenny Attenborough is thirty two years old and is the inventor of the Compostwiz. The Compostwiz is a solar driven digging device approximately 1.5 metres in length, containing a carbide tipped, stainless steel retractable probe 200 millimetres long. The Compostwiz utilises a miniature micro-computer combined with nano-technology to instantly analyse and calculate soil composition and provide precise instructions for transforming unusable, useless soil into luscious, nutrient rich compost/top soil capable of growing most plants and vegetables. Details of soil composition are wirelessly transferred by the device to a secure cloud based data repository developed and maintained by Jenny. The Compostwiz is made entirely of carbon fibre rendering it extremely light and therefore easy to use by people of all ages. It has attracted enormous popularity amongst a range of users including home and market gardeners, commercial nurseries and farmers both private and commercial and demand has always exceeded supply. Coming from a farming background, Jenny was always looking for ways to improve soil condition as this has an enormous impact on a farm’s productive capacity. After leaving home, she decided to purchase a hobby farm and after meeting her husband (a former graduate of Deakin University’s engineering faculty) she spent the next decade developing the Compostwiz. Their greatest challenge was ensuring that the stainless steel probe could operate effectively in all soil types and under all temperatures. After years of testing, Jenny eventually launched the Compostwiz under a new business venture in 2010. Jenny’s new business is a private company called Compostwiz Pty. Ltd. The business manufactures and distributes the Compostwiz but the two most important components (the carbon casing and the stainless steel probe) are obtained from external suppliers located in Canada and Spain respectively. The supplier in Spain is the only company in the world capable of making the probe. Compostwiz Pty. Ltd. comprises a number of standard functional areas in line with most small to medium enterprises. The company’s organisational chart is shown below:
The departmental directors are named in their respective function boxes in the chart. The number of employees working under each director is shown in each of the function boxes respectively (numbers of employees in each department include the directors of those departments). The sales function is also charged with marketing and service responsibilities; service requests though are usually referred to the logistics department. The accounting function is also charged with finance responsibilities. The production function manufactures the Compostwiz and manages the warehouse. The firm has a centralised IT function which provides some of the firm’s IT needs. Compostwiz Pty Ltd currently employs 50 individuals, including Jenny.
The business experienced strong growth in its first few years and this enabled it to grow quickly. In 2017 things started to change. Sales were down and profits reduced (see profit table below). This decline continued through 2018. The Chinese economy continued to exhibit volatility and the separation of the UK from the EU continues to impact economies around the globe. Innovation and client responsiveness are seen as imperative for long term sustainability.
Sales of the Compostwiz essentially relied upon word of mouth communication and a solid marketing strategy had not been developed at all. Worse still, Jenny had never put much time or effort into developing streamlined and computer based business processes and rather, resorted to many paper based manual methods to get things done, including purchasing material, controlling production, satisfying customer orders and managing all the accounts.
Jenny’s business strategy has always centred on innovation and up to this point, nobody had been able to produce a comparable device that could compete with the Compostwiz thus giving her a sizeable competitive advantage.
She underpins this strategy with a focus on quality and customer responsiveness. She also realises that, given a recent rise in customer complaints about delays in receiving orders, her firm’s customer responsiveness is waning and needs redress. Jenny wishes to maintain her strategic stance but knows that organisational change must occur urgently if it is to work as intended.
Jenny decided to hold a meeting with her directors. They assembled during the morning around the board room table where Jenny asked “What happens when a customer places an order for a Compostwiz?” (Jenny’s question assumed that the group would understand that a customer might be a wholesale or retail customer or an individual purchasing directly from the company either online (via eBay) or via phone or fax. Compostwiz Pty Ltd does not have a retail store front).
Bette spoke up and said, “well, we write up a sales order form and send it to production.” Mike said, “when we get to the sales order form, usually within three days, we physically check to see if there is a Compostwiz (or number of Compostwizs) in stock that suits the configuration required and if there is, we pack it, label it and write stock details onto the sales form and send it over to Greg’s guys to ship it out and we also send a duplicate copy to John so he can organise the accounts. We keep a triplicate in a box in my office – one day I will sort through these and complete a reconciliation. I also keep ‘post it’ notes of sales orders on my office whiteboard – these usually match the triplicates in the box so I don’t need to fiddle with the papers in the box.” When the box is full, we send it to John in Accounting.
Then Greg said, “well, when we get the sales order from Bette, we sign it and make notations of the date and time, then, when we pack the order onto one of the trucks for local delivery or get Fedex to collect it for interstate or international delivery, we forward the sales order along with a shipping note to John in accounting. We don’t know what he does with it but we’ve always done this. We keep a photocopy of the shipping note in a ring binder in the warehouse office.
When the photocopier is broken we just slap a ‘post it’ note on the order in the folder. This seems to work well because we don’t lose the details for many orders”.
Then John spoke up and said, “when we receive the sales order from Bette we file it and wait for the shipping order to come in from Greg. We usually cross check all sales orders and shipping orders that are sitting on our desks every day to ascertain whether an invoice action can be taken. When we see a sales order and a shipping order for the same sale (which we ascertain by looking at the name of the customer on the order), we send the customer an invoice to the customer’s address, either their shipping or head office address – it doesn’t really matter, we just choose whichever address appears first on the order. Payment terms are net 14 days and the majority of our customers pay within this time which means that there is very little action required in following up debtors.”
Jenny sighed quietly to herself and then asked, “well, what happens if we haven’t got any suitable Compostwizs in stock?” Mike said, “well, when we get the sales order from Bette and check for suitable stock, if we find that we’ve run out, we organise a purchase request and send it to Jake so that we can get the necessary materials to make more. It only takes us a few days to get the purchase request organised and sent.” Jake then spoke up and said, “when we get the purchase request from Mike, we file it for action so that purchase requests are tended to in order of date received. That’s how we prioritise things in my department!
When we finally find time to get to the request, we study it and then organise purchase order forms which we complete and send to our respective suppliers. We send these in the surface mail. It usually takes about four and a half weeks before we receive dispatch confirmations and invoices from our suppliers indicating that our orders have been filled and sent. Then we send the original invoices from our suppliers, with a payment order, to John so that he can organise payment for the materials. Our job is done!” John then said, “when we receive the invoices and payment orders from Jake, we pay these immediately. We’d hate to ruin our relationships with our suppliers.”
Jenny sensed tensions between members of the group. She particularly noticed a strong three way tension between Mike, Jake and John. Bette seemed to be the most positive member of the group, even though sales were down, and whenever she spoke, Jenny noticed that all other members of the group became anxious.
Jenny was beginning to see the consequences of her neglect of the firm’s business processes and sensed that if all of this were to continue, she could be out of business within a couple of years or even sooner. She is confident that the Compostwiz can adapt to changing times and will remain very popular for many years to come but she knows that she must match this fantastic product with excellent business processes.
Jenny engages your BPM consulting firm to help make sense of the current organisational approach and to provide some preliminary advice about redesigning processes so that the current downward trend in performance can be reversed. She gives you the transcript of her meeting with her directors (as seen above). She also provides you with some other basic information that she quickly gathered together for you including some Balance Sheet items (to help you to form a view of the firm’s position to invest in change) and some other miscellaneous information which might help you to determine the extent of change necessary. No other information is available to you to develop a solution. Jenny states that she has at least been conscious of accumulating some cash reserves for the firm’s development and that it seems the day has come to use some (or possibly all) of these! All of this is revealed in the tables shown below.
Your task is to prepare a preliminary business report for the CEO. The main body of your report must be structured using the following headings. A brief about what each section of the report must address is also provided.
BPM and Strategy
- State in plain terms what Business Process Management is and how it can help ’Compostwiz Pty Ltd’
- In describing the benefits of BPM, ensure that you briefly explain how BPM connects to:
- While there are a number of problems within ‘Compostwiz Pty Ltd’, you are required to concentrate your efforts on the problem which you determine to be the most urgent. Failure to clearly identify what you consider to be the most urgent problem, will result in the loss of five marks. In relation to this problem, you are required to identify the causes and the consequences of the problem.
- Identify the capabilities gap and the performance gap.
- Show the current ‘As Is’ process using Bizagi Modeler software.
- Identify any process flow problems and/or day to day management problems; output and input problems; and problems with controls and enablers; develop a project scoping diagram to illustrate the problem which you have identified
- Explain what it means to develop a ‘business process architecture’ and, particularly, how valuable this can be to ‘Compostwiz’ and its success .
- Describe a ‘To Be’ process and explain how the process will address the most urgent problem identified in the previous section; what will the ‘To Be’ process do, or not do, when the change project is rolled out .
- Support your ‘To Be’ process with a BPMN process flow diagram using Bizagi Modeler software (or other graphical software if you are unable to use Bizagi).
- Are there any key aspects in your proposed solution that you should clearly describe to Jenny, for example: SOA; ERP; Master Data; Core, Support and Management processes; alignment issues; etc?
- Based on the information provided in your proposed solution, you must also include a fully annotated organisational structure chart.
- Large BPM driven organisational changes can be extremely valuable, they are also complex undertakings impacting the organisation, its people and its use of modern technologies.
- Identify and briefly describe significant considerations that might impact ‘Compostwiz Pty Ltd’, both during the redesign development stage and upon the implementation of your proposed solution. Some considerations might pertain to the costs of bridging the gap (time, effort, money, etc.), risks, opportunity costs, internal politics, etc.
- Specifically address any upstream or downstream implications (within or outside the organisation) of the solution you have proposed, stating why these implications are important. Recommendations Provide a succinct list of recommendations to conclude your report.
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