Consider the following process for the admission of graduate students at a university. In order to apply for admission, students first fill in an online form. Online applications are recorded in an information system to which all staff members involved in the admissions process have access to. After a student has submitted the online form, a PDF document is generated and the student is requested to download it, sign it, and send it by post together with the required documents, which include: • Certified copies of previous degree and academic transcripts. • Results of English language test. • Curriculum vitae. When these documents are received by the admissions office, an officer checks the completeness of the documents. If any document is missing, an e-mail is sent to the student. The student has to send the missing documents by post. Assuming the application is complete, the admissions office sends the certified copies of the degrees to an academic recognition agency, which checks the degrees and gives an assessment of their validity and equivalence in terms of local education standards. This agency requires that all documents be sent to it by post, and all documents must be certified copies of the originals. The agency sends back its assessment to the university by post as well. Assuming the degree verification is successful, the English language test results are then checked online by an officer at the admissions office. If the validity of the English language test results cannot be verified, the application is rejected (such notifications of rejection are sent by e-mail). Once all documents of a given student have been validated, the admission office forwards these documents by internal mail to the corresponding academic committee responsible for deciding whether to offer admission or not. The committee makes its decision based on the academic transcripts and the CV. The committee meets once every 2 to 3 weeks and examines all applications that are ready for academic assessment at the time of the meeting. At the end of the committee meeting, the chair of the committee notifies the admissions office of the selection outcomes. This notification includes a list of admitted and rejected candidates. A few days later, the admission office notifies the outcome to each candidate via e-mail. Additionally, successful candidates are sent a confirmation letter by post.
With respect to the above process, consider the following questions:
1. Who is the customer?
2. What are the possible outcomes of this process?
3. Identify various activities in this process and (estimate) activity timing (using your experience)
4. Describe process architecture
5. Provide diagrammatical process model
6. Classify activities of this process in: value adding, non-value adding, and business value adding activities
7. Comment on how is the process performing using activity time as a measure of process performance
8. What are other measures that can be used to assess the process performance?
9. If this process is to be incrementally improved, suggest an improvement plan.
10. If this process is to be automated, suggest an automation plan. Which type of process technology should be used?
11. If this process to be reengineered, suggest a redesigned process.
12. What could be some (failure) factors that could disallow the implementation of the redesigned process?