Porter's 5 Forces On Daimlerchrysler

Project Proposal

Identifying The Business Processes of Company A, Assessing & Enhancing Them Via Workforce Synergy

Introduction

This proposal is to investigate the current problems faced by Company A in terms of its business processes. Company A has 44 employees ; 18 full time and 26 part-timers and its primary area of business is on ICT networking. Among others, Company A provides consultation on ICT network and at the same time, if so needed, also does the actual implementation of the networking end at the physical level. In many cases, Company A also supplies the hardware and software component of the entire network. In some cases, Company A has to work in partnership with one or more entities to complete an assignment within the (clients ÐŽ¦) stipulated time-frames and on a cost-effective measure.

While Company A has been progressing on a gradual scale in terms of securing profitable businesses, the main issues at hand would include shortage of competent workers who are willing to be employed on a lower rate, coordination between the accounts and purchasing unit, coordination between the ground workers and project manager, variation within the price / fee structure among different customers/clients, issues related to customer/clients satisfaction, after-service follow-up and its measurements.

Literature Review

A business process is a recipe for achieving a commercial result. Each business process has inputs, method and outputs. The inputs are a pre-requisite that must be in place before the method can be put into practice. When the method is applied to the inputs, then certain outputs will be created. A business process is a collection of related structural activities that produce something of value to the organization, its stake holders or its customers. It is, for example, the process through which an organization realizes its services to its customers. A business process can be part of a larger, encompassing process and can include other business processes that have to be included in its method. In that context a business process can be viewed at various levels of granularity. The linkage of business process with value generation leads some practitioners to view business processes as the workflows which realize an organization's use cases.

Business processes can be thought of as a cookbook for running a business and reaching business goals defined in organization's business strategy. There are three types of business processes:

„X Management processes - the processes to run the operation, and comply to all relevant requirements. Typical management processes include "Corporate Governance" and "Strategic Management";

„X Operational processes - these processes deliver the customer value, they are part of the core business. For example: "Deliver goods";

„X Supporting processes - these support the core processes. Examples include "Accounting", "Recruitment", "IT support".

Business process consists of subprocesses, decisions and activities. Subprocess is a part of higher level process which has its own goal, owner, inputs and outputs. Activities are parts of the business process that do not include any decision making and thus are not worth decomposing (although decomposition would be possible), such as "Answer the phone", "produce an invoice".

A business process is usually the result of a business process design1 or business process reengineering activity. Business process modeling is used to capture, document and reengineer business processes. To visualize a business process, one of the graphical notations can be used such as Business Process Modeling Notation.

The term Business Process (BP) refers to activities performed by businesses to optimize and adapt their processes. Although it can be said that organizations have always been using BP, a new impetus based on the advent of software tools (business process management systems or BPMS) which allow for the direct execution of the business processes without a costly and time intensive development of the required software. In addition, these tools can also monitor the execution of the business processes, providing managers of an organization with the means to analyze their performance and make changes to the original processes in real-time. Using a BPMS the modified process can then be merged into the current business process atmosphere.

Where Business Process Reengineering (popular in the 1990s) dealt with one-off changes to the organization, Business Process Management deals with the continuity and embedding of process orientation in the organization. Business Process Management has evolved as technology has caught up with management processes to the point that technology should no longer be the limiting factor in BPM.

Business Process Management encompasses other process elements, such as Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma, Performance Management, etc.. The activities which constitute business process management can be grouped into three categories: design, execution and monitoring.

Process design encompasses either the design or capture of existing processes. In addition the processes may be simulated in order to test them. The software support for these activities consists of graphical editors to document the processes and repositories to store the process models. An emphasis on getting the design of the process right will logically lead to better results as the flow on effect of problems at the design stage logically affects a large number of parts in an integrated system.

Evolution of business processes requires a change to the process design to flow on into the live system. Integrating business process is also a current research area. Integration of software for process design to be used both for creating graphical representations of workflows and implementing and maintaining these workflows makes evolution of business processes less stressful, given that requirements are not as static as information systems.

Process execution is a traditional way to achieve the automatic execution of processes is that an application is developed or purchased which executes the steps required. However, in practice, these applications only execute a portion of the overall process. Execution of a complete business process can also be achieved by using a patchwork of interfacing software with human intervention needed where applications are not able to automatically interface. In addition, certain process steps