Question

Question 1

Identify business processes from your own experience that may have been competitive at some stage, but which seem at this point to be unnecessarily complex or outdated given what competitors offer?

Question 2

Consider the following list and indicate which of these you would consider as process redesign initiatives. Motivate your answer and, if applicable, provide the links to the elements discussed.

An airline has seen its profits falling over the past year. It decides start a marketing campaign among its corporate clients in the hope that it can extend its profitable freight business.

A governmental agency notices that it is structurally late to respond to citizen’s queries. It decides to assign a manager to oversee this particular process and mandates her to take appropriate counter actions.

Answer 1

Question 1

I would like to share my experience at my workplace wherein a business process was competitive at a particular point however it was an unnecessarily complex than what the competitors offer.

The company that I worked was a multinational publishing company. The concept of Open Access was a business process that was highly competitive and all publishing company was striving hard to integrate the Open Access (OA) in their publishing of books, journals and online e-content. Open Access journals are journals that are available online free of cost without any financial, legal or technical burden to the readers. The content was freely downloadable and access to all. However, there was a fee based open access system named as APC (Article Publishing Fees) which was funded by payments paid by authors or other funding bodies. It was an unnecessarily complex activity as it was highly cumbersome to incorporate OA in journals that were already following the traditional methods. Then after some time, OA process became outdated due to the innovation of new websites such as PubMed, ScienceDirect, Public Library of Science, Education Resources Center, Science Open, etc that provided free access to scientists, researchers, authors and other professionals to the online content.

Question 2

“A governmental agency notices that it is structurally late to respond to citizen’s queries. It decides to assign a manager to oversee this particular process and mandates her to take appropriate counter actions.”

The above initiative by the governmental agency is a process redesign initiative. The reason is that the government appoints a new level of hierarchy and named the executive as a ‘Manager’ to oversee the particular process. This change in the organizational hierarchy is a classic example of process redesign.

On the other hand, the initiative taken up by the airlines company is a marketing effort to increase sales. The marketing campaigning of the airlines company especially for its corporate clients (specific market segment) is a marketing effort to increase sales of freight business thereby increasing the profitability.