MT400 Unit 10 BPM initiative report example

Three Decisions for Leadership: An MT400 Unit 10 BPM Initiative Report on a Window Installer's Contract-to-Cash Pilot

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

MT400: Business Process Management

Unit 10 BPM Initiative Report

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The company, pilot figures and costs are composite; the methods and sources cited are real.

Decisions Requested

The first decision is to extend the redesigned contract-to-cash process from the Lincoln showroom to Omaha in the first quarter and Council Bluffs in the second. The rollout costs about 31,000 dollars: 19,000 in training time for five roles, 8,400 for fourteen crew tablets and 3,600 for a shared measure calendar. The evidence is the Lincoln pilot, where the median from signature to cleared payment fell from 69 days to 56 while the Omaha comparison showroom stayed at 72.

The second decision is to approve the workflow platform on one condition, that the office manager names, before any contract is signed, which order-entry and invoicing hours will turn into real savings and how. Across 10,000 simulated trials in Unit 8, the platform's five-year value centered near 42,300 dollars, but the case fails in nearly every trial if fewer than 40 percent of the saved hours become savings, so the condition protects the company from buying an assumption.

The third decision is to confirm the Unit 9 charter, under which the director of customer delivery reports to the president, owns the process rules and controls a 60,000-dollar improvement budget, but hires no one and sets no pay.

What the Pilot Showed

The redesign ran at Lincoln for every contract signed during an eight-week window, with Omaha keeping the old process as a comparison. Lincoln signed 212 jobs in the window, and each was followed to payment; 196 had paid by the cut-off date for this report. The 16 still open were counted at their elapsed days, which can only understate the median if anything, since fewer than half the jobs were open.

Set side by side, the six indicators moved in Lincoln and stood still in Omaha. Contract to installed fell from a median of 57 days to 51 in Lincoln and rose from 58 to 59 in Omaha. Installed right on the first visit rose from 79 percent to 86 in Lincoln and slipped from 78 to 77 in Omaha. The remake rate fell from 6.6 percent to 5.3 in Lincoln and held near 7.0 in Omaha. Installed to paid fell from 11 days to 4 in Lincoln and stayed at 11 in Omaha. Status calls fell from 1.9 per job to 1.2 in Lincoln and edged up to 2.0 in Omaha. The post-install rating rose from 4.1 to 4.3 in Lincoln and stayed at 4.1 in Omaha.

The comparison showroom is what makes these figures worth reading. Both showrooms ran through the same weeks of the same season, with the same manufacturers and the same weather, so a seasonal explanation for Lincoln's gains would have to explain why Omaha did not share them. A pilot without that comparison would leave every figure open to the reply that autumn is always faster. Shadish et al. (2002) describe this design as a nonequivalent comparison group, stronger than a simple before-and-after measure but still short of random assignment, and the claim made here is sized to it.

Two months and 212 jobs support a direction, not a precise number, and the report asks leadership to act on the direction.

What the Pilot Did Not Settle

Three limits deserve plain statement. First, 212 jobs is enough to show that the median moved but not to fix how far; a fair reading is that the redesign cuts somewhere between ten and sixteen days, not exactly thirteen. Second, Lincoln and Omaha differ in crew experience and housing stock, so part of the gap may reflect the showrooms rather than the process. Third, the installed-to-paid gain shrank in the last two weeks. It averaged 3 days through week six and rose to 6 in weeks seven and eight, after a crew lead left and his replacement had not been trained to photograph the signed completion certificate the same afternoon. The dip is useful evidence in its own right: the fifth change depends on one habit at one moment in the job, and the rollout plan trains every crew lead on it before the first Omaha install.

The Term's Work in Four Pages

The pilot rested on four earlier steps, summarized here so leaders can see the reasoning without reading each paper.

The process architecture in Unit 2 grouped the company's work into seven end-to-end processes named for what they deliver. Contract to cash crossed eight of eleven departments, more than any other, and every move between those departments was a handoff where work could wait. An architecture diagram in the appendix highlights contract to cash and marks service request to resolution as the next candidate.

The prioritization matrix in Unit 3 fixed three weighted criteria before scoring any process, defined each score level and justified every row from twelve months of job records. Contract to cash ranked first under the chosen weights and under two alternative weightings, so the ranking did not depend on the weights alone.

The handoff analysis in Unit 4 sampled sixty jobs on a BPMN model and split the 71-day company median into actual work, internal waiting and the manufacturer's build. Internal waiting was the largest share the company controlled, and it gathered at five handoffs: the measure booking, the sales manager's approval loop, the financing hold, partial kits and the unsigned completion slip.

The redesign in Unit 7 answered those five waits in the order the course teaches, removing or moving steps before considering tools, and projected a gain of about 17 days. The pilot delivered about 13. The shortfall came mostly from the measure booking, where sales representatives booked on the spot for 74 percent of contracts rather than all of them, so the next round of training targets that step.

Why the Charter Comes Before the Rollout

Process gains tend to fade once the project team returns to its regular work and attention moves elsewhere. Kotter (1995) warned that declaring victory too early is one of the commonest ways change efforts fail, because the new behavior has not yet been anchored in how the organization runs. The charter is the anchor here. It gives one role the authority to hold the release, scheduling and close-out rules in place when a department's own target pulls against them, and it places the BPMN model under change control so that departments cannot quietly revert. The council's agenda for its first quarter is already set: approve the Omaha rollout schedule, review the first month of Omaha indicators against Lincoln's, and agree a revised crew utilization target that fits the new scheduling rule.

The Next Twelve Months

In the first quarter, the redesign extends to Omaha, every crew lead is trained on the completion certificate, and the director reports monthly indicators for both showrooms. In the second quarter, Council Bluffs follows, and the office manager presents the named savings that decide whether the workflow platform proceeds; vendor selection begins only if the condition is met. In the third quarter, if the condition was met, the platform is set up around the new rules rather than the old ones, and the council reviews whether the balancing measures show any sign of rushed releases or crew overtime. In the fourth quarter, the October annual review compares results with targets, and discovery work begins on service request to resolution, the next process in the portfolio. Dumas et al. (2018) present process monitoring as the stage that feeds the next round of discovery, and the roadmap puts both on one timeline so that the end of this project is also the start of the next.

Recommendation

Approve all three decisions. The rollout carries a modest cost against a median gain of about two weeks per job, the platform is approved only on terms that protect the company if its main assumption fails, and the charter keeps the gains in place after this report is filed. Hammer (1990) argued that the largest gains come from redesigning work rather than speeding up the old version, and the pilot is evidence that most of this process's delay could be removed without new software at all.

References

Dumas, M., La Rosa, M., Mendling, J., & Reijers, H. A. (2018). Fundamentals of business process management (2nd ed.). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-56509-4

Hammer, M. (1990). Reengineering work: Don't automate, obliterate. Harvard Business Review, 68(4), 104-112.

Kotter, J. P. (1995). Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail. Harvard Business Review, 73(2), 59-67.

Shadish, W. R., Cook, T. D., & Campbell, D. T. (2002). Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for generalized causal inference. Houghton Mifflin.