Case Study $-$ Business Process Improvement A government department undertook a national programme to refresh technology and services across all its offices. Its programme finance team relied on spreadsheets, a simple database and hard copy invoices to process over R$100$ million of invoices generated by the programme. Unfortunately, this resulted in untraceable orders, misplaced invoices and delayed payments, leading to an annual deficit of over R$10$ million of unpaid and late invoices. The Challenge Having recently come in to review and improve their forecasting and budgeting models, I offered to include the invoicing process in the review. My offer was quickly snapped up and with a small $($really small, minuscule really$)$ budget I was given $6$ months to $$see what I could do$.$ Quick wins To generate interest and demonstrate early benefits, I targeted some quick wins. These included: $$ Updating and improving the financial forecasting and budgeting models to be more consistent and accurate. This involved standardising the process to make is simpler and easier to understand. $$ Issuing new, clear instructions $($and ensuring that they were understood by the various teams around the country$)$ through one$-$to$-$one conversations and groups workshops. $$ Automating excel spreadsheets, providing drop down lists and restricting any local modifications $($a common issue$)$ of the model by locking down and password protecting cells. $$ Streamlining the data collection process and automating the production of monthly forecasts by providing a single mailbox for returns, automatically collating the separate returns and producing a single standard unified report. These quick wins were implemented within $8$ weeks $($much of which was taken up incommunicating and engaging with the various teams around the country$).$Improving Process The existing invoice payment procedures were then reviewed and mapped with input from the business, the finance team and suppliers. To keep things simple and minimise the amount of change required, $($I mentioned the small budget, didn$$t I?$),$ I proposed to work with existing technology that the department was already familiar with, specifically, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets powered by VB macros and an update to the existing MS Access database. $($You really had to be there to understand the limitations I was working with, but it was always planned to upgrade to a more suitable solution in the future$).$ The new process incorporated: $$ A new MS Access database to record, track and manage invoices and payments. $$ Import of existing records in to the database $$ this identified several duplications, inconsistencies and errors that needed to be $$cleaned$.$ Generation of automated orders $($by internal Project Teams$)$ and invoices $($by Suppliers$).$ Email of orders and invoices directly in to the finance team mailbox which were then imported automatically in to the database. $$ Complete audit trails, so we could track deliveries and match invoices to delivery notes and receipts. $$ BACS payment requests sent direct to the bank on approval of invoices, improving accuracy and timeliness. $$ Improved SLA criteria, with which we were able to hold the suppliers to account for delayed and misplaced deliveries, just as they were able to hold us to account forfailure to pay. $1\mathrm{.}2$ critically discuss the factors that influence organizational structure