Portfolio Sample
Purpose:
Illustrates “Current State” and proposed “Future State” related to coordinating dates for a project.
Note:
The IIBA defines Gap Analysis as: “A comparison of the current state and desired future state of an enterprise in order to identify differences that need to be addressed.”
Problem:
The client was wrestling with regular inconsistencies with inventory. In the effort to keep inventory available for projects, the company had to invest heavily in communications between the cast of actors to coordinate the project from sale to completion.
Diagnosis:
Through a series of interviews and workshops where SME’s (subject matter experts) drew out the workflow within each team, describing the interconnectivity between teams and the communication efforts involved.
Piecing all this together, it was found that changing the project’s start date was a big problem, sparking multiple phone calls and emails between departments, and external parties. The end result of the current state was chaos, and panic towards deadlines and supplying inventory, affecting staff morale and patience of external business.
A more effective and low cost solution needed to be found.
This symbol legend explains the meaning of some of the symbols in the following diagram.
Actors: Customer, Suppliers, Installers, Estimating department, Scheduling department, Warehouse, Distribution department, and Purchasing department.
The first diagram displays the current state related to a changing the “Start Date”
WH-CTX-Dia-1
Displays the communication patterns involved in managing dates for all actors in the current state. Red warning symbols are problems.
There are 10 channels of communication which produces too many potential failure points.
WH-WF-DIA-StartDate Chg-1 (pg1)
The start date could be triggered internally by (Estimating, Sales, or Scheduling) or an external actors such as the customer or installer to affect the date.
What’s important about WH-CTX-Dia-1 is the number of red problem points. This manual process has an enormous level of failure.
WH-WF-DIA-StartDate Chg-1 (pg2)
As the process progresses, communication points increase in number. This increases the probability for failure. The primary problem coming to light is the amount of time required to keep this process flowing.
Each party may need hours or days to respond with an answer.
Manager: “what did you get done today?”
Team member: “Well I spent 3 hours making calls between suppliers and installers coordinating the delivery of inventory for customer X, when I had these other priorities on my plate which I couldn’t get to.”
Manager: “This is not a good use of your time, if only there was a way to solve the problem where people weren’t typing emails and negotiating on the phone.”
Team member: “oh and in that 3 hours I had to talk to the Estimating and Warehouse teams about this.”
Manager: “so other teams were also consumed with this issue, so I’ve paid 3 people to solve this issue?”
Team member: “oh, the problem isn’t solved, we’re still waiting to hear from ABC supplier if they can have product Y delivered by the 18th.”
WH-WF-DIA-StartDate Chg-1 (pg3)
The client was finding delays could range between a couple hours and a couple days. It was uncovered that it could take 10 days to accomplish this process. It’s possible for each team member to consume an hour per communication event.
The math:
If there’s 9 communication points and at each point there could be 3 teams involved, and it takes an average of an hour per team member.
| Comm Points | Labour Hours | Total Labour | Hourly Rate | Cost Of Waste |
| 9 | 3 | 27 | $20 | $540 |
Here’s where it got unpleasant, there could be 30-40 projects on the go. The activities and communications could be costing the company 10 hours of wasteful activity for each project. This effort is simply to coordinate inventory and its installation.
Recommendation:
By automating the process with internal system bots, the workflow and process could eliminate the 27 hours of labour, and provide a means to reduce the delay times. Intangible values could now be improved such as: moral, and elevated engagement from suppliers and installers.
Using a business rules engine that has rules for each entity, decisions could be made by the bots based on criteria passed in to the bot. The bots could then manage all the forms of communications between actors.
Bots can be monitored for analytics to make decisions for improvements.
Dia-FS-StartDate_Automation Bot-1
Automating business systems for the client opened the door to major benefits:
- Increased throughput or productivity
- Increased throughput or productivity
- Improved quality or increased predictability of quality
- Improved robustness (consistency), of processes or product
- Increased consistency of output
- Reduced direct human labor costs and expenses
- Installation in operations reduces cycle time.