Pharmacology

1. Assignment 2 Marking Guide

1.1. What type of process is the above one: order-to-cash, procure-to-pay or issue-to-resolution?

1.2. Who are the actors in this process?

1.3. What value does the process deliver to its customer(s)?

1.4. What are the possible outcomes of this process?

1.5. Taking the perspective of the customer, what performance measures can be attached to this process? (10 marks)

1.6. What potential issues do you foresee this process might have? What information would you need to collect in order to analyze these issues?

1.7. What possible changes do you think could be made to this process in order to address the above issues? (10 marks)

2. Process Analysis and Modelling

2.1 Model the prescription fulfilment process described using BPMN. Use subprocesses where required, and nest them appropriately. (30 marks)

2.2 Is there any sub-process that can potentially be shared with other business processes of the same pharmacy, or of other pharmacies? (5 marks)

2.3 Identify the steps in this process and classify them into value adding, business value-adding and non-value-adding. (5 marks)

2.4. Write an issue register for the pharmacy prescription fulfillment process. Analyze at least the following issues:

Sometimes, a prescription cannot be filled because one or more drugs in the prescription are not in stock. The customer only learns this when they come to pick up their prescription.

Oftentimes, when the customer arrives to pick up the drugs, they find out that they have to pay more than what they expected because their insurance policy does not cover the drugs in the prescription, or because the insurance company covers only a small percentage of the cost of the drugs.

In a very small number of cases, the prescription cannot be filled because there is a potentially dangerous interaction between one of the drugs in the prescription and other drugs that the customer has been given in the past. The customer only finds out about this issue when they arrive to pick up the prescription.

Some prescriptions can be filled multiple times. This is call a “refill”. Every prescription explicitly states whether a refill is allowed and if so how many refills are allowed. Sometimes, a prescription cannot be filled because the number of allowed refills has been reached. The pharmacist then tries to call the doctor who issued the prescription to check if the doctor would allow an additional refill. Sometimes, however, the doctor is unreachable or the doctor does not authorize the refill. The prescription is then left unfilled and the customer only finds it out when they arrive to pick-up the prescription.

Oftentimes, especially during peak time, customers have to wait for more than 10 minutes to pick-up their prescription due to queues. Customers find this annoying because they find that having to come twice to the pharmacy (once for drop-off and once for pick-up) should allow the pharmacy ample time to avoid such queues at pick-up.

Sometimes, the customer arrives at the scheduled time, but the prescription is not yet filled due to delays in the prescription fulfillment process. When making assumptions to analyze these issues, you may choose to equate “oftentimes” with “20%of prescriptions”, “sometimes” with “5%of prescriptions” and “very small number of cases” with “1%of prescriptions”. You may also assume that the entire chain of pharmacies consists of 200 pharmacies that serve 4 million prescriptions a year and that the annual revenue of the pharmacy chain attributable to prescriptions is € 200 million. You may also assume that every time a customer is dissatisfied when picking up a prescription, the probability that this customer will not come back after this experience is 20 %. You may also assume that on average a customer requires five prescriptions per year.

Taking the issue register as a basis, apply Pareto Analysis to determine a subset of issues that should be addressed to reduce the customer churn due to dissatisfaction by at least 70 %. Customer churn is the number of customers who stop consuming services offered by a company at a given point in time. In this context, this means the number of customers who stop coming to the pharmacy due to a bad customer experience. (30 marks)

3.0 Process Redesign

3.1. Apply some of the redesign heuristics described in Chapter 8 in order to address the issues documented in the issues register. (20 marks)

3.2. Capture the resulting to-be model in BPMN. (20 marks)

3.3. Explain the impact of the changes you propose in terms of the performance dimensions of the Devil’s Quadrangle. (10 marks)

Make sure you answer all elements of the assignment and that they are numbered as above in your answer. The solution must be submitted as one word 2013 file with a coversheet detailing all group members names and student ID.

The BPMN models for 2.1 and 3.1 need to be done in Signavio and shared with your lecturer for marking – an embedded pdf of the BPMN from signavio should be inserted in to the solution file.

When sharing the files from signavio the files need to be named with the surname of the person submitting the assignment and “as-is” or “to-be”. These will be marked in the final lab session.

1. The type of process

The process described in the study is known as order to cash process. According to vom Brocke and Sinnl (2011), order-to-cash process the order is implemented after getting the orders from the customers and the cash is paid fully or partially to the shopkeepers. In this context, the order is given by the customers in advance in morning and the implementation of order is done within 5 p.m. by the pharmacist. Between that, order is checked thoroughly in multistage process for quality enhancement. The payment is made fully or partially to the medicine shops.

2. The actors in this process

There are two actors in this process – customers and medicine shops.

3. The value delivered by the process to the customers

The process described in the case study delivers value of time and price to the customers. The time is saved due to allowing customers to deposit their prescriptions in morning and pharmacists also check DUR of the medicine with respect to past data of the patient (Zellner, 2011). This step ensures that patients will not be affected by any means due to incorrect prescription prepared by doctors. It provides value of time as well as to price as it is useful in changing the drugs at the very first moment (Storbacka and Nenonen, 2012). 

4. The possible outcomes of the employed process

•    The possible outcome of this process is as follows:
•    Reduction in cost of purchase of the patients
•    Decrease in side effects of medicines
•    Time saving of the customers
Cash savings of the customers due to insurance checking by the pharmacy shop

5. The performance measures can be taken in this case

Customers can measures this process in their perspective using two variables – time saving and money savings. 

6. Potential issues and essential information for analyzing the issue

The potential issues might be present in this context are as follows:
•    Supplying over demanded medicines at 5 pm
•    Unavailability of medicines in pharmacy shops
•    Change in prescribed drug
•    Communication with the customers and doctors

7. The possible changes to control the issue

The possible changes in controlling the issues might be helpful in supplying drugs to the customers. The change in the process of DUR checking and insurance checking must be in same phase as if any incompatible is watched in both the case then pharmacists need to call the doctor and customers. If pharmacists have to call two times for a prescription then it will be really time consuming and costly activity in view of the pharmacy. Therefore, to reduce the cost and save time of the process, after making the both checking, pharmacists must go forward for resolving the issues. This will enable the pharmacists to shadow the unavailability of medicines and further, the required changes in the prescription of the drugs can be done in this way. The change in the process will be helping in reducing the chances of miscommunication with the customers regarding the change in drugs and also make the communication effective.