Process Analysis

Process Analysis Ð'- Phase II

Operations Management

BUS 326

Dr. Kevin O'Mara

Submitted by: Ana Marie Jaramillo

I. Phase I: Review

The process in review is the recruitment and hiring of new personnel for office or technical positions for the company Petaquilla Minerals Ltd. The process is very important to the organization, as they currently employ over 1,200 workers, approximately 400 are in office/technical position. The company is undergoing major expansion as their main gold projects begin production and over the next two years they will increase there professional workforce by almost double, and they will conduct this process for each new position. Petaquilla must uphold exceptionally high standards and be sure to adhere to all the laws and regulations of a publicly traded company, including openness to all its shareholders and showing that they manage their company correctly; all new employees must follow these rules as well as they become part of the organization.

Petaquilla is currently implementing standard, efficient, verifiable processes throughout the organization because they are preparing for the expansion stage and since their introduction to the NYSE occurred only a few years ago. This also means that they have to strive to produce at the margin and not waste time, capital and efforts in order to satisfy shareholders. The recruitment process currently takes more time than it should, and the departments that request a new employee wait too long for someone to help get the job done. The main goal in my process is to make suggestions that would speed the recruitment and hiring process, in other words, my main performance metric is to diminish the number of days that it takes since the advertising of the job vacancy to signing a contract with the new employee.

Table 2: Pareto Chart

II. Recommendation

The Pareto analysis is essential to my recommendation, because it allowed me to pinpoint major bottlenecks in the process. Although data did not exist regarding the problems or complaints, I decided to survey 18 workers within the organization that are involved in this process. My population for the survey was four department managers, the general manager, and the rest were secretaries and employees of the human resource department. I proposed five steps in the process and asked them to choose three bottlenecks and to give a score of three to the one they believed was the greatest bottleneck and a score of one to two other weak processes (ranking was arbitrarily suggest by the HR manager), and a zero point to the two they believed to be running the smoothest. The population ranked the first application as being 49% of the problem, checking references was ranked at 21%, scheduling interviews was 18%, medical results scored at 8% and managers' approval only at 4%.

Having job candidates fill out the first application form is complicated for a few main reasons. The first is that most applicants already have a job or are getting a degree, and it is very difficult for them to take time during there work day to come into the offices and fill out the application. The next reason is because the application is filled out by a large number of candidates which are later filtered, but the company has to provide an opportunity for all of them. When it comes to the second interview, for example, much fewer candidates are scheduled to return. My primary suggestion is that a copy of the application should be transferred to digital format, and made available via the internet (e-mail or logging into the company's webpage). This would allow applicants to access the form at any time and from any computer or internet station. I reviewed a copy of the application with the computer technician and he confirmed that digitalizing it would not be difficult at all. Currently, this part of the process takes about nine days, but with the new format this time could probably be