Assignment Task: Assume that a business process modelling notation (BPMN) business process model is required for the business process described below, and that you are starting to work on it. Construction International is a construction company specializing in public works (e.g. roads, bridges, pipelines).
Construction International site engineers often need to hire a special type of equipment, such as a truck or a bulldozer, from specialized heavy equipment suppliers.
When a site engineer needs to hire this kind of equipment, he/she sends an Equipment Hire Request to one of the clerks at the Construction International depot. The clerk at the depot first checks if appropriate equipment (owned by Construction International) is available at the depot for the required period of time. If it is, the request is filled, and the equipment is delivered to the construction site. Otherwise, the clerk checks an system that lists all equipment offered by their suppliers and selects the most cost-effective piece of equipment that complies with the request. She then checks the availability of this equipment with the equipment's supplier via phone or e-mail. Sometimes, the selected equipment is not available, and the clerk has to select another piece of equipment and check its availability with its supplier, and so on.
Once the clerk has found suitable piece equipment available for hire, she recommends to the works engineer that the request to hire it be approved. The works engineer usually approves equipment hire requests once per day, and in about 109% of the cases, the works engineer rejects the equipment engagement request. He can either reject it completely or ask that the selected equipment be replaced with cheaper equipment. In this case, the clerk needs to perform another availability enquiry.
Once the works engineer has approved the hire, the clerk sends an email confirmation to the supplier (attaching a Hire Order form) and she records it in an Excel spreadsheet that she maintains in order to keep track of all the approved equipment hires. These two steps can be done in any order.
a) Use BPMN to create a model of the process described above. Your model must represent the roles of those involved using pools and swim lanes and it must model decisions appropriately. You may create your model by hand and include an image of it, or use Visio and both insert an image and upload the Visio file.
b) Explain three (3) inefficiencies or problems with the process - that is, what the issue is and why it is a problem or makes the process inefficient. For each issue explain which of the following performance indicators it impacts on: time, quality, cost, flexibility.