EXAMPLES

The method presented in this chapter was applied to Millenium Manufacturing, an Asian manufacturing firm. The firm had grown during good Asian times.
Seeing clouds on the horizon, they wanted to get new, more efficient systems
and processes. They had made one attempt at getting a package, but this fell
apart because the package appeared to have few benefits.
The approach was applied to 10 critical manufacturing and distribution
processes at Millenium. Here, the sales process is used as an example. Sales
crossed marketing, accounting, order entry, warehousing, and billing. Four trans-
actions were identified. One was the most common. A second applied to big
ticket items. The other two applied to exceptions. The diagram of a transaction
in the current process appears in Figure 2.1. The one for the new transaction appears in Figure 2.2. Note that the new process involves electronic commerce and
is quite different from the current process. An intermediate process was identified in Figure 2.3. The evolution is to proceed through Figure 2.3 and toward
Figure 2.2 from Figure 2.1. This model was the same for all transactions.
The next step was to show how the process, organization, systems, and roles
would change as work progressed (Table 2.1). In this table, the process is simplified in preparation for later implementation. Management fears of risk and
positive/negative impacts are eased through the organization and roles entries.
Atlas Bank had spent a lot of money on new software, and the staff claimed
to be happy and to think it was a success. Management saw little results from the
money. Productivity and staffing levels were the same. Customer service was unchanged. As a result, management was frustrated. At this point, they decided to
invoke a policy that all major systems expenditures had to be accompanied by
detailed, enforceable savings and benefits. It became readily apparent that the
business process would have to be changed to achieve this policy.
The first area of the bank to follow the policy was the credit card and lending
area. A process plan was developed for installment loan collections. The benefits
were great if changes were made in both the systems and the processes.
However, this was only a small part of the business unit. Parallel process
plans were developed for credit card, real estate, and leasing in the business
areas of application processing, servicing, collections, and charge-off/recovery.
With these process plans in place, an implementation strategy was devised.