Question

Business processes are important to communicate an organization’s best practices as they leverage themselves against competitors. Some benefits of business processes are that in the long-run, gains may be realized in cost reduction, meeting customers’ expectations, and streamlining business operations. Business process management then focuses on workflow which may hinder good performance. Identify a business process for which there is not yet a workflow diagram, explain the situation, and devise a workflow to address the problem. Defend your workflow and identify any areas of concern that may hinder successful implementation and a proposed remedy to that concern.

Answer 1

Problem: There is a company ABC Incorporation who wants to launch new range of chemicals and is currently a supplier of equipments. They wish to inform the customers about the launch of the new range of new chemicals complementing the equipments that are already being supplied in the market.

Solution: Clearly in the above case, ABC Incorporation does not have any business process in place as the product to be launched is completely new. Below are the workflow steps proposed to ABC Incorporation for launching the new chemical range so as to achieve customer expectations.

1. Identify the current installations of ABC Incorporation at the various customer places and to which industry segment these belong to.
2. Identify and list down all the chemicals that would be required in the particular industry segment.
3. Shortlist the chemicals on the basis of volume or profit or both.
4. Identify the personnel in the ABC Incorporation who can promote these chemicals.
5. Identify the suppliers of these chemicals in case ABC Incorporation wants to do a trading of these items. In case, it wants to manufacture, then identify other aspects such as land, raw materials, logistics and so on.
6. Develop a market penetration strategy depending on the current state of competition.
7. After the above has been finalized, inform the customers about the launch of these new chemical products.

The steps listed in the above case are not in detail, however, one can clearly identify a major problem. The current company ABC Incorporation may not have sufficient number of people to market the new range of chemicals in their existing team. They should have a thorough understanding of the processes involved and also should be able to suggest ABC Incorporation on the new product launches. This can be solved in the following manner. We may recruit one expert outside ABC Incorporation and we may ask him/her to suggest the way forward since he would be from the field of chemicals. The expert can then internally train some of the existing staff who would be interested to work in the new chemical business development team being headed by the expert. In this way, we can partially eliminate the high cost of recruiting an entirely new team for chemicals, especially at a stage when the business has not picked up sales and profits.

A second problem that one could foresee is the identification of the products to be launched. Sometimes it may happen that we may get a high volume- low margin product or a high margin –low volume product. In such a case, depending on the profit target, we can select which products to be launched first. For example, if ABC Incorporation has the target of increasing its total sales value, then the first option should be selected as higher the volume, more would be total sales. However, a limit should be set for this as we should not be in a position where we lose the margins that we got from the sales of equipments.