Business Process Briefing
Business process management refers to a particular framework that can be followed by any business organization for streamlining their business operations. The business process mainly includes the daily process through which a particular product or service is delivered to the customer (de Oca et al., 2015). For instance, if the company is a restaurant, the business process will include the cycle of seat allocation, food ordering, cooking, serving and finally bill payment. In this scenario, the business process management framework is required to ensure the activities are conducted in the right sequence and manner.
For the purpose of this assignment, a restaurant in Australia named Taco Bill has been considered. The restaurant sells some specific and popular Mexican food and has a particular business process model for the operations. In this report, their business process has been considered and critically analyzed using the as-is and to-be process mapping.
The case study is about an Australian restaurant Taco Bill that mainly sells Mexican food items like tacos, enchiladas and others. The restaurant has a particular process that is sequentially described as follows.
Customer Entry – Once every while a group of customers enters the restaurant for buying and eating the products cooked and sold by the restaurant (Rosemann & vom Brocke, 2015). There are two staffs who welcome the customers and allow them to enter into the dining area.
Seat Allocation – After the customers enter the restaurant premises, they are allocated with seats. However, if no or insufficient vacant seats are available, the customers have to wait for some time. This is a major problem because when there is a peak hour, too many people enter the restaurant and wait for seats to get vacated. This results in growing dissatisfaction of the diners as well as the waiting customers.
Order – When the customers are seated, a menu card is handed over by the waiters. Checking the menu card, the customers place their orders that are received and delivered to the kitchen.
Serving – After the order is prepared, the kitchen staffs ping the waiters who will then take the items and serve them to the customers.
Billing – When the customers are finished with their food, the waiters hand over the total bill to the customers. The customers make payments accordingly and after receiving the invoice, they vacate the seats and leave.
An as-is map is used to develop a business process model framework that is currently existing i.e. it reflects the functioning business process model of the company. Hence, the as-is model is based on true facts and must be according to the process set by the company itself as a part of the business plan (Pinggera et al., 2015). Based on the existing business process model followed by the restaurant, the “As-Is” process map has been developed as follows.
Figure 1: As-Is Process Map
(Source: Created by Author in Visio)
A to-be model is generally developed based on the analysis of the as-is model within which several changes are made. First, in the as-is model, the main issues are identified and based on the analysis results, suitable changes are made. These changes include addition of new activities, changes in the sequences of activities and altering some of the activities to suit the requirements (Li et al., 2014). Hence, the to-be map does not reflect the real process model as it is only a recommendation and the company may or may not choose the recommended model. Based on the analysis of the main issues of this particular business model, a “To-Be” process map has been designed that reflect the main changes in the business model and is shown as follows.
Process Mapping
Figure 2: To-Be Process Map
(Source: Created by Author in Visio)
In the above two diagrams, the as-is mapping and to-be mapping have been shown. These maps are analyzed and discussed as follows.
As-Is Mapping – This particular mapping reflects the current business process model followed by the restaurant. The business process model has already been discussed in the previous header. However, while mapping the process, a number of issues with the business process have been detected. These issues are resulting in the increase in customer dissatisfaction and hence, they need to be changed (Stavrou et al., 2014). On the first sight at the map, it can be seen that there is nothing with the process model as it follows a basic process structure that is used in restaurants. However, in the process map, it can be seen that there are no decision processes in the entire framework i.e. the restaurant has not considered any decision making process while developing the framework. The two main areas that require decision making process are letting the customers to enter the restaurant and taking orders from the customers (Rosa et al., 2017). The main things to be considered here are that the customers should enter the restaurant only if there are vacant seats inside and the customers can only order a particular food item only if it is available in the restaurant. The restaurant does not follow such decision making process and as a result, the customers have to wait for a long time inside the restaurant when seats are not vacant and also they become dissatisfied when the items of their choices are taken as order but not served to them due to unavailability.
To-Be Mapping – In order to solve the issues that have been detected through the previous mapping, a to-be map has been developed that introduces the changes within the business process model. The main changes in the model include two decision making processes within the overall business model (Jeston et al., 2014). The first decision making process is placed before the customers get seat inside the restaurant. In this process, before the customers are allowed inside, one of the staffs should check whether there are vacant seats inside the restaurant (Braun et al., 2015). If the answer is yes, the customers will be allowed inside. However, if the answer is no, the customers will be told to wait and it will be the customers’ call whether they will wait or find another place to it. Hence, this process will risk losing customers due to waiting time but the customer satisfaction will not go down and the popularity will not decrease as well. The second decision making process is placed before the order is received from the customers. In this process, the customer will first verify with the waiter if the selected item is available or not (Biard et al., 2015). If the answer is yes, the order will be placed and if the answer is no, the customer will have to choose another item. Following this process, the customer will have a clear idea about what is available and what is not instead of getting denied after the order has already been placed. This will ensure the customer satisfaction is not reduced during the ordering and serving process.
Critical Analysis of the Process Mapping
From the overall analysis of the business process using the two process maps, it is evident that business process mapping can be a very useful tool for developing a successful process framework (Fellmann et al., 2015). In addition to the development of the framework, the business process map also helps to determine any issues or errors within the existing framework used by the organization. On the other hand, the process map has its limitations as well. The business process map is only a rough estimation and does not provide the most accurate version of the framework (Panayiotou et al., 2015). Again, many of the activities in the entire process are affected by several other factors that are not taken into consideration by the process map. Hence, it can be said that the process map is an useful tool for developing an accurate business process model but only with limited benefits and a number of different disadvantages.
Conclusion
In this report, the case study of the company Taco Ball has been considered. This company sells Mexican food items and allows the customers to dine in. As a part of the overall business process, the company has developed a specific business model framework. The current business process model includes welcoming guests inside the restaurant, allocating seats to the customers, receiving orders, serving orders and processing the bill payment. This entire framework has been diagrammatically represented in the business process map. From the analysis of the representation developed in the map, it has been observed that some additional decision making steps will further enhance the model. The decision making steps mainly have two different outcomes based on whether the answer is yes or no. According to the new decision making steps identified for the model, another recommended model has been developed in which these two particular steps have been added within the existing sequence. From the study of the business process using the two process maps, it is evident that business process mapping can be a very useful tool for developing a successful process framework and hence, they have been suitably used for developing the existing and proposed models of the chosen company.
References
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