Improving Operational Sequence For Taco Bill Restaurant: A Business Process Analysis

1. Critically analyse the role of management information systems in sustaining successful organisations.
2. Critically evaluate approaches to business process management and systems, their associated risks and implementation processes.
3. Establish and justify governance processes for business process management change to ensure that all stakeholders are considered in technology change decisions

Current Business Process Analysis

In this study, an Australian company named Taco Bill has been selected for analyzing their existing business process. Following the analysis of the business, an “as-is” process map has already been developed that reflects the current processes followed in the restaurant. Accordingly, an improved process sequence has been suggested in the form of a “to-be” process map. This process map shows the proposed changes in the existing process in order to enhance the entire operational framework used in the restaurant.

In this report, the proposed process for the restaurant has been discussed with specific emphasis on the audit and governance process to be used to enhance the business of the company.

Any successful business process requires suitable audit process that ensures the flow of the business activity is moving in the right direction and in the right method. Similarly, for Taco Bill, in order to implement the proposed changes in the process, a suitable improvement in the audit process is also required in order to ensure the implemented process changes are successful (Fellmann et al., 2015). In order to review the audit process improvement methods, first, the proposed business processes are discussed as follows.

In the new business process (to-be process), two decision making processes are added i.e. checking whether seat is available before allowing entry to the customer and checking if the food is available before the order is accepted from the customer. These processes have mainly been added in order to ensure the customers know the situation early and take suitable decisions whether they will enter and order or not (Cheikhrouhou et al., 2015). However, there is a major risk considering both these cases. It has been estimated that within a few years time, there will be at least 10 or more similar size restaurants around Taco Bill i.e. market competition will increase sharply. In this case, if a customer is kept on hold (when the answer to “are seats available?” is no), he may leave and choose to eat in a different nearby restaurant. Again, if the food item the customer has asked for is not available, he may leave and try a different nearby restaurant. From these cases, it is evident that with the addition of these new decision-based process parts, the company faces the risk of losing more customers once the competitive rivalry increases due to the increase in the number of nearby restaurants.

Proposed Business Process

Audit process is required to ensure the proposed processes are working as they should be and also to ensure the customer satisfaction is increased due to the services of the restaurant. The restaurant requires daily up to date calculation of customers served, payments received, food items sold, raw materials bought and others. The audit process can be divided into several different categories – Food Audit, Sales Audit, Customer Service Audit and others (Pinggera et al., 2015). The purpose of food audit is to track daily purchase of raw food materials, the amount of food materials actually sold, the amount of food materials wasted, customer demand of a particular food item and others. Based on the audit, the following day / month, changes can be applied to ensure the customer favourite food items are readily available and there is minimal wastage of food. The purpose of sales audit is to ensure the payments are kept up to date and accurate as well as updated in the database. The purpose of the customer service audit is to ensure the customers are treated with care and value at all the times (Rosemann & vom Brocke, 2015). There have been reported cases that the customers have been made to wait for such a long time that they got angered and left before allowed entry. The audit process will ensure the customers will be told an approximate waiting time if all the seats are filled inside so that the customers will have a clear idea when they will be allowed to enter into the restaurant.

In the previous report, based on the problems in the existing process, a proposed set of processes has been developed as a part of the “to-be” process. However, one main concern is that whether the “to-be” process can be implemented as a “should-be” process i.e. whether the proposed changes are absolutely required and whether these changes will completely solve the current gaps and problems in the current process.

It has already been discussed in the previous header that the company faces a major threat if the “to-be” process is implemented and there is no suitable audit process. Considering the threat as well as the gaps in the current process, in an ideal “should-be” process, the overall restaurant has to be expanded to accommodate more customers as well as recruit more chefs to increase food productivity to ensure there is no shortage of any particular food item at any time. However, these proposed changes are business decision related and are not within the scope of this discussion.

Importance of Audit and Governance Process

In the proposed “to-be” process, the regular operational process will include two more decision making processes that are already discussed above. However, these two decision making process are not sufficient for solving the main issues. These two processes only help the company to manage the customers a bit better but there is no actual benefit from these two. For a restaurant business, it is a hard and fast rule that the customers will not like to wait for a long period of time to enter into the restaurant and also will always desire their preferred dishes (especially for regular customers). Hence, it is important to provide seats to the customers at short time and also provide their preferred food items. As a result, the suitable “should-be” process should include a waiting time confirmation for the customers i.e. an estimated time will be given to the waiting customers if the restaurant is houseful and this can be further enhanced by providing the customers with certain discounts and offers proportional to the waiting time of the customers beyond the specified estimated waiting time. Another suitable “should-be” process is to evaluate the customer favourite dishes of food based on the total sales at the end of each month and based on it, the raw food items can be procured such that the items with higher sales rate will be cooked in a much higher quantity than the least sold ones.

In order to ensure the BPM changes have been successfully implemented, a suitable governance process is required that will monitor the impacts of the changes in the system. In this particular case, if the proposed changes are implemented, a governance process will be required to monitor whether the customer satisfaction has actually been increased and the sales of the restaurant have increased or not (Li et al., 2014). The main point of this particular implementation of changes is to increase the customer satisfaction that has been decreasing for quite some time and provide the customers with the best quality of services as per their requirements. For the changes in the process of handling the waiting customers, it is to be governed whether the customers are actually happy about the change or they prefer to move on to somewhere else as they are not willing to wait for a long time. The governance process will also monitor how many customers are lost at this rate every month and how much time the customers are willing to wait for before entering the restaurant.

Stakeholders' Considerations

In order to establish the changes, it is also required to ensure the stakeholders are also suited to meet the requirements of the new system. The primary stakeholders of the company include the members from the management team whereas the secondary stakeholders include the store manager, food manager, security manager and others. These stakeholders need to ensure the proposed changes are implemented with success (Rosa et al., 2017). There can be some interactive sessions when the actively involved stakeholders are shown the requirements of the proposed system and how they should operate to ensure the changes are successful. The following table shows the considerations of stakeholders for both process and technological changes.

Conclusion

This report is used to discuss the proposed changes in the restaurant named Taco Bill. Based on the analysis conducted, suitable recommended process changes and their impacts have also been discussed accordingly. However, these changes are not final and can be changed to meet the requirements of the management team of the restaurant.

References

Biard, T., Le Mauff, A., Bigand, M., & Bourey, J. P. (2015, October). Separation of decision modeling from business process modeling using new “Decision Model and Notation”(DMN) for automating operational decision-making. In Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises (pp. 489-496). Springer, Cham.

Braun, R., Schlieter, H., Burwitz, M., & Esswein, W. (2015). Extending a Business Process Modeling Language for Domain-Specific Adaptation in Healthcare. In Wirtschaftsinformatik (pp. 468-481).

Cheikhrouhou, S., Kallel, S., Guermouche, N., & Jmaiel, M. (2015). The temporal perspective in business process modeling: a survey and research challenges. Service Oriented Computing and Applications, 9(1), 75-85.

de Oca, I. M. M., Snoeck, M., Reijers, H. A., & Rodríguez-Morffi, A. (2015). A systematic literature review of studies on business process modeling quality. Information and Software Technology, 58, 187-205.

Fellmann, M., Delfmann, P., Koschmider, A., Laue, R., Leopold, H., & Schoknecht, A. (2015, September). Semantic Technology in Business Process Modeling and Analysis. Part 1: Matching, Modeling Support, Correctness and Compliance. In EMISA Forum (Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 15-31).

Jeston, J. (2014). Business process management. Routledge.

Li, Y., Cao, B., Xu, L., Yin, J., Deng, S., Yin, Y., & Wu, Z. (2014). An efficient recommendation method for improving business process modeling. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 10(1), 502-513.

Panayiotou, N. A., Gayialis, S. P., Evangelopoulos, N. P., & Katimertzoglou, P. K. (2015). A business process modeling-enabled requirements engineering framework for ERP implementation. Business Process Management Journal, 21(3), 628-664.

Pinggera, J., Soffer, P., Fahland, D., Weidlich, M., Zugal, S., Weber, B., ... & Mendling, J. (2015). Styles in business process modeling: an exploration and a model. Software & Systems Modeling, 14(3), 1055-1080.

Rosa, M. L., Van Der Aalst, W. M., Dumas, M., & Milani, F. P. (2017). Business process variability modeling: A survey. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 50(1), 2.

Rosemann, M., & vom Brocke, J. (2015). The six core elements of business process management. In Handbook on business process management 1 (pp. 105-122). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Stavrou, V., Kandias, M., Karoulas, G., & Gritzalis, D. (2014, September). Business Process Modeling for Insider threat monitoring and handling. In International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Digital Business (pp. 119-131). Springer, Cham.