Unit $8$ Assignment: Establishing Baselines and Assessing Success

This assignment will assess your knowledge based on the following Course Outcomes:

MT$400-5$: Evaluate methods to implement and deliver benefits from a Business Process Management $($BPM$)$ project.

GEL$-8\mathrm{.}03$: Apply critical thinking to formulate a logical solution to a problem.

In this assignment, you will evaluate a specific business process based on the criteria detailed below. The business process you select must have a clear beginning and an end, with identifiable, specific steps. Your instructor will confirm that the process you selected is suitable or will ask you to select another one.

For this assignment, compose a paper that answers the following questions $($use the subheadings$/$numbered questions below to organize your paper$)$:

Part $1$: Implementation Strategies

You will use critical thinking to evaluate the suitability of the four implementation strategies discussed in Step $2$ for your project $($big bang, parallel, relay, combination$).$ You will then select the best fit and describe how this implementation should be customized for your situation.

For each of the four strategies, analyze the specific pros and cons of using it for your project. The analysis should be based on how each strategy applies to the process you selected and the nature of your selected organization. Do not simply repeat the generic pros$/$cons from the book. Evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of each strategy and how these would manifest themselves for your project.

Select the one you think will work best in your situation. Justify your selection.

Explain how you would design and execute this implementation strategy for your selected process.

What would be required for the success of this strategy when rolling out your revised process?

Part $2$: Establishing Baselines

To begin, list three metrics that you think can help you quantify the performance of the current process. Next, list and define the metrics clearly, explain why each metric is important in the assessment of the process, and then give an example of the statistic units. For example, if your metric is $$speed of processing,$$ it may be defined by how quickly each employee audits a tax form, and the example would be that $$on average, you would expect eight tax forms audited per hour.$$ If you have already done this in a previous assignment, you may copy and paste a summary from that assignment.

Then, revisit the metrics you selected for your baseline. For each metric, clearly discuss the following:

$1.$ Describe what the metric is: how is it calculated and used currently?

$2.$ As far as being used as a justifiable project goal, what kind of a change in this metric would constitute success? How did you arrive at this figure? If this target change figure is not possible to estimate now, then describe how you would compute it if you were actually carrying out this project: who would be involved and where would the data come from?

Part $3$: Case Analysis

Read the following case study and answer the questions at the end.

In $2020,$ ABC Computer Company decided to implement a BPM project to reduce the assembly cost per computer with the following goals:

Decrease the labor cost per computer.

Increase profit for each computer sold by $5\%.$

To track the success $($or failure$)$ of the project, they determined the following baseline data for $2020$:

Total # of Computers Sold Materials Cost per Computer Labor Cost per Computer Average Retail Price Per Computer Average Profit Per Computer

$8958$ $$462$ $$178$ $$899$ $$259$

implementing the BPM project, ABC Computer Company reviewed the value of the project after a year and identified the following information:

Total # of Computers Sold Total Materials Cost Total Labor Cost Average Retail Price per Computer

$9562$ $$4,176,000$ $$1,385,000$ $$925\mathrm{.}97$

Using the data provided above, calculate and fill in the following table $($show all your work; completing the table without the calculations will result in no credit$)$:

Materials Cost per Computer Labor Cost per Computer Average Profit per Computer

A

After the table is complete, address the following questions:

Why is it important to ensure that the baseline data is accurate?

Was the project successful? Why or why not?