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Process Modeling, Process Improvement, and ERP Implementation
ANOTHER LOOK

Business Process Management—A Business Responsibility
Although many people may think of automating a process as an IT responsibility, it is
not. It is a business responsibility. Business users within an organization must agree on
what the old business processes are before the organization can begin to think about
adopting—and automating—new business processes. That is exactly what happened with
the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB).
The RPSGB is the professional body for pharmacist professionals in Great Britain.
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The RPSGB’s responsibilities include investigating complaints against pharmacists and
pharmacy technicians, and recommending criminal prosecutions, when appropriate.
The RPSGB’s business process management project began in response to challenges
the organization was experiencing with the Access database system that handled
complaints. By 2006, the database could no longer effectively handle the volume of
complaints the RPSGB was receiving, so the organization established a team to introduce
new software to help manage its complaint process. Initially, the team could not decide
which processes the new software should automate. Team members also disagreed on
what level of automation was required and on what type of documentation needed to be
maintained. Therefore, the team decided they needed to define the organization’s
current business processes before determining how to make the complaint management
process more efficient. The team created various process maps to develop a graphic
representation of the existing processes.
The complaint process begins when a complaint is filed against a pharmacist. For
example, complaints might be triggered by a rude pharmacist or, more seriously, by a
drunk pharmacist dispensing the wrong medication. Some types of complaints require
specific actions, which were documented with the process map.
Only after the team had mapped all the current processes and identified ways to
make them more efficient was software applied to automate those processes. The team
also worked with the British government to ensure the new processes had the flexibility
to be changed quickly if new rules governing the pharmaceutical industry were passed
in Parliament.
The entire project took almost two years to complete. During that time, the RPSGB
focused considerable energy on change management to convince those involved that
changing the processes was worthwhile. In this case, many employees were more easily
convinced of the merits of the project because legislation that would require certain
process changes was due to be passed shortly. The new automated system greatly
reduced the RPSGB’s dependence on paper, and it helped the organization achieve its
goal of having 80 percent of all cases requiring further action being filed with the
organization’s Investigation Committee within three months of the completion of the
initial investigation.

Questions:
1. Why is it important to understand your current business processes before
trying to improve them?
2. Why might it be difficult for a group of workers to come to an agreement
about what their current business processes are?

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