Reengineering the Business Process in a Laundry Appliance Repair Shop Essay

Reengineering the Business Process in a Laundry Appliance Repair Shop - Essay Example â€Å"Fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business process to achieve dramatic improvements in critical measures of performance such as cost, service, and speed." (Hammer & champy, 1993) This principle, combined with other management principles, will breathe a new life into the laundry appliance repair shop that is due for innovation as its operation process is inadequate to meet customer demand in terms of timely quality service, as well as achieve profit for the business. This proposal aims to evaluate the current business procedures that can be changed in order to meet customer specifications while at the same time increase organization efficiency by creating a performance standard which will enable the business compete suitably in the market. The laundry repair shop is a small business with the human resource capacity of two employees; the technician who handles repairs and a support person who handles the budget, call center and accounts. Currently the business proce dure is as follows: a customer calls the shop, the support person answers it and requests the potential client for their need. The support person then hangs up and calls the technician to inquire about his availability and the resource requirement for the job, i.e. time, costs. The client is then called back and the information is relayed back to them in order for contract to be accepted and put into the system. Also the business uses recycled old machine parts in the repairs when the customer cannot pay for new parts. This increases the probabilities of reworks and breakdowns. This business model is based on a finite small customer base where the technician could meet the demand of the market and faced very little competition, factors which have changed with growth in the customer demand, technology and increase in competition. Complete and radical change of the process is necessitated in order for the firm to achieve positive internal results, as well as satisfy its customers. By carefully defining the elements of processes, i.e. jobs, tasks, precedence constraints, resources and flow management protocols the dramatic change that is sought will be achieved (Hammer & champy, 1993) The first operation that will require change is the cumbersome and cost ineffective call center. The customer might require immediate and direct feedback within the shortest time on the availability and the cost of the service. The support staff also lacks general information of the job requirements or the availability of the technician making him unable to effectively queue the client’s job into the system. The lack of a job log in the process creates a situation in which jobs may be ignored, a timeline and standard record is unavailable and performance cannot be measured and evaluated for future planning. Finally, the use of old machine parts when customers are not willing to pay for new one affects the quality of the product and while it seems a like win-win in the short t erm, it leads to long term loses for the business with reworks, as well as customer dissatisfaction. With the identification of these three areas of the process as requiring redesign, the new business model will seek to completely change