Discussion 1

For my business problem, I will be tackling the idea of expansion. I will be using some examples from my current employers, VeriFone. Take for example the Special Projects team, which handles all projects for VeriFone, which include new loyalty roll outs from specific Major Oil Companies, such as ExxonMobil or Chevron, or new features that need to be pushed out and configured for a Major Oil Company's stores, such as touch pay or chip payments. This team is currently only based out of the Clearwater office of VeriFone, but the company is seeing more and more push from major oil providers to expand the teams and increase the number of hours the teams is available. By creating a new Special Projects team at the San Diego office of VeriFone could solve both of these problems, both increasing the number of agents working on projects and increasing the hours of availability because of the time difference. The biggest question is, how do you expand a team to an office that currently does not have any members of the team or supervisors located at the office? What would be involved with expanding a team to the other side of the country and what is the best and most efficient way of going about this?

The main objectives of the expansion would be to:

1. Increase the number of agents on the Special Projects team
2. Increase the availability of the Special Projects team agents to the customers
3. Minimize negative impact on efficiency or put delays on current projects

Now completing this in a single environment would prove its own challenges. How do you hire more staff and train them without hindering performance of the other team members? How many agents are needed, and what are their working hours? How many managers or supervisors are needed for the number of agents that we have/are expanding to? These are all very important questions to consider when doing an internal expansion, but porting this expansion over to another office space on the other side of the country makes these somewhat manageable tasks that much more difficult.

Discussion 2

The business problem is the current claim of the audit and refund response process is not adequately comprehensive, which may consequently expose the business to financial risk when we do not respond timely and appropriately to refund requests of accounts already paid by a secondary insurance payor.

Asserting the Objectives:

Objectives are significant since they formulate the source for evaluating the alternatives. Classifying the objectives, will assist determining specific information to support clarify other alternatives.

• Reduce audit and refund response from an average of 60 days to within 40 days, which is the require time frame permitted.
• Condense internal and external customer communication outcomes related to responding timely from one department to another from 2 weeks to 48 hours upon receipt.
• Improve procedures and policy for regulatory law and business rules.
• Increase tracking record to 60% of audit and refund response process by an average of 20% over 12 months beginning January next year.

The organization is focusing on providing better customer service to its internal and external customers. In the direction of meeting this need we plan to capitalize in several plans that contribute to this goal. A successful solution will cause all parties involved to be aware of roles and responsibility of procedures, communication, tracking records and resources. The business will be able to reduce the financial risk occurrences by effectively and efficiently responding timely to refund request. This will result in better communication with internal and external customers building a better relationship resulting in better-quality process improvement and team management as it will be within the alignment of the organizational goals.