Assignment: Establishing Baselines and Assessing Success

In this Assignment, you are going to evaluate a specific business process based on criteria detailed below. If you already have selected a business process, continue using that and skip to the next paragraph. If you have not yet selected the business process you will use for these Assignments, then begin by selecting one. The business process you select must have a clear beginning and an end, with identifiable, specific steps.

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

Part 1: Implementation Strategies

Evaluate the suitability of the four implementation strategies discussed in step 2 for your project.

• For each strategy, explain 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.
• Select the one you think will work best in your situation. Explain how you would execute this 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. 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:

• Describe what the metric is: how is it calculated and used currently?
• 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 2009 it was decided that ABC Tire Company would implement a BPM project with the following goals:

• Decrease the labor cost per tire, and
• Increase profit from each tire sold by 5%.

To track the success (or failure) of the project, they determined the following baseline data for 2009:

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

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):

After the table is complete, address the following questions:

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

2. Was the project successful? Why or why not?