3.

What do you understand by the term business process and business process improvement
as described in this article.

From the article, business process is a series of steps of business activities, which
purpose is to get ultimate customer satisfaction by providing what they need at the time they
need it and the how they need it. This means that the process describes and concentrates on
the customer rather than other things.
Business process improvement is defined as a method of improving the way of the
process by which a set of business activities is designed and managed. Taking the current
process and improving the process to achieve a goal. Benefits such as feeling of contribution,
accomplishment, and of pride in work, increasing job security, creating satisfied customers
and a lot more can be extracted from the business process improvement.


4. When improving business processes, what does a process improvement team focus on?

The process improvement team focuses on improving characteristics of a process such
as cycle time, quality and cost.
Cycle time is a good measure as it identifies involvement of the critical resources that
create bottlenecks. Extra critical resources will be used if the cycle time is long. Here, the
process improvement team will focus on reducing or eliminating the wait times either before
or after each activity. A defined start and stop point is also argued to shorten the process,
focusing on the entire process rather than only one aspect of it.
Simulations are also very useful to identify alternative scenarios to improve the
business process. Process simulation helps to find the optimal solution when an AS-IS
process is properly defined, documented and presented. The simulation approach can be used
to model the business process, resource and cost estimation of the proposed model and to
analyse the financial constraints.
Other than that, prototyping is also one of the core activities of the implementation
team, building trial versions of a system as a proof of concept of the TO-BE process
scenarios. These trial versions can be used for assessing ideas and selecting the final model.
After testing and validating the prototype, the organisation can migrate to the new process.


5. Describe the methods used to gain an understanding (how do you collect information)
about one business process in this study. Who, from credit card department can provide that
information?

To understand the AS-IS process of the business, individual and group interviews of
the employees involved in both managerial and operational activities were done, also some of
the important customers. Guided interviews regarding to issues and requirements have been
conducted with individuals from various units of the credit card department to identify details
of the existing process. Interviewing makes it possible to concentrate and focus entirely on
the factors related to the existing process. This technique collected data from all levels of
employees as this helps in interpreting experiences of the respondents in detail. From the data
collected from the interviewed process participants, the researcher can understand the process
flow and linkages of the business process. Distribution channels, card operation unit,
consumer credit unit and contact point verification (third-party agency) are some of the
participants involved.