A major manufacturer of popular beverages has appointed a local distributor to serve a specific territory. The demand for the beverages has a pronounced seasonal pattern. The distributor performs well overall, but is repeatedly unable to keep up with fulfilling many customer orders during peak demand periods. The distributor's current delivery capability is stretched to deliver 60 tons of merchandise per day whereas the season's peak demand periods need a daily delivery capability of up to 100 tons.
The distributor is under pressure to fully meet the year-round market demand in order to stay in business. The distributor's management wants to identify and consider more cost-effective options as resorting to adding more trucks and drivers would not be economically feasible.
A business analyst (BA) has spent several days observing and measuring the warehouse activities to understand the situation and to gain insights into possible solutions. The delivery workflow is a four-step process: (1) picking the orders and assembling them on trays, (2) bringing the trays to the loading bay, (3)
loading the orders into trucks, and (4) delivering the orders to customers. As the following table illustrates, overall performance depends is dependent on five major resources: (1) the workers who pick the orders and load them into trucks, (2) the tallyers who check the orders, (3) the drivers, (4) the trucks, and (5) eight loading bays (LBs).
What is the company's primary business objective in this scenario?
A health insurance provider undertakes enhancements to its mobile application platform and finalizes the following capabilities as part of the scope of the next release:
I.Ability to integrate online maps and global positioning system (GPS) technology with the mobile application in real time to display location of service providers in the subscriber's vicinity that participate in the subscriber's plan network.
II.Ability for the subscriber to lookup the service providers by specifying either a postal code or a search area radius in miles.
III.Ability for the subscriber to initiate the download of fee information for one or more service providers in a single request.
Through requirements workshops the business analyst elicits the following detailed business requirements:
1.The company's mobile application platform must support real time integration with the following third-party systems:
A ) GPS System
B ) Postal Code Validation
2.The service providers available for selection must participate in the subscriber's medical plan network as of the current system date.
3.The map display shall highlight the boundary of the search area with a dotted yellow line.
4.The extent and shape of the search area shall be determined based on one of the following user choices:
A ) Postal code – Subscriber location acquired from GPS shall be used to determine and populate the related postal code as the default postal code with options for the user to change the postal code.
B ) Radius for the search area around the subscriber's location, that will have default value of 5 miles. The radius can be changed by the subscriber with a maximum range of 50 miles.
5.Subscriber shall be able to select one of the options above and supply corresponding input.
6.System shall validate the user input and display appropriate error messages if invalid.
7.Based on the inputs and the plan of the subscriber, the system shall retrieve information for the participating service providers that are located within the designated search area.
8.System shall display a map including visual markers to indicate locations of the service providers in the top half of the device screen and a list of the same service providers in the bottom half of the device screen.
9.The list of service providers shall include the Name, Phone Number and Street Address.
10.If the subscriber specified the radius or retained the default postal code for the search area, the list shall additionally include the approximate driving distance in miles from the subscriber's last registered location and the list shall be sorted in the ascending order of the driving distance.
11.The subscriber shall be able to select a service provider either from the list or from the map and download a document that contains the name, contact telephone, email address, fax number and the fee schedule for the covered services applicable to the subscriber's plan.
Which primary subscriber business need is addressed with the enhancements?
A major manufacturer of popular beverages has appointed a local distributor to serve a specific territory. The demand for the beverages has a pronounced seasonal pattern. The distributor performs well overall, but is repeatedly unable to keep up with fulfilling many customer orders during peak demand periods. The distributor's current delivery capability is stretched to deliver 60 tons of merchandise per day whereas the season's peak demand periods need a daily delivery capability of up to 100 tons.
The distributor is under pressure to fully meet the year-round market demand in order to stay in business. The distributor's management wants to identify and consider more cost-effective options as resorting to adding more trucks and drivers would not be economically feasible.
A business analyst (BA) has spent several days observing and measuring the warehouse activities to understand the situation and to gain insights into possible solutions. The delivery workflow is a four-step process: (1) picking the orders and assembling them on trays, (2) bringing the trays to the loading bay, (3) loading the orders into trucks, and (4) delivering the orders to customers. As the following table illustrates, overall performance depends is dependent on five major resources: (1) the workers who pick the orders and load them into trucks, (2) the tallyers who check the orders, (3) the drivers, (4) the trucks, and (5) eight loading bays (LBs).
Each truck can only make two trips a day. The BA has noticed that only 30% of trips have their orders available for loading when a truck arrives. Otherwise the truck has to wait one extra hour until the orders are picked and brought to the loading bay.
If trucks are the only constraint, approximately how many hours are lost due to this downtime?
A financial institution engaged in mortgage lending has embarked on a business process improvement initiative to eliminate the activities that hinder growth to ultimately improve the success rate of its mortgage business. As a benchmark for identification, the institution is keen on improving any business process that has less than a 75% success rate. The institution has appointed a business analyst (BA) to review the business transactions for the processes of origination, payments, and closures, as well as identify opportunities for improvements and recommend solutions.
The BA has collected the following information over the last three months pertaining to these business processes:
•All the business processes are at their maximum capacity in terms of the current number of transactions.
•Each business process has a certain number of rejects and the reasons for rejection include documentation, verification, collateral, and funding. Funding rejects occur when the bank's customers have failed to make payment of their mortgage processing fee or mortgage closure payment.
The BA has also recommended the use of documentation checklists as a solution to eliminate the documentation rejects.
If the financial institution always works at full capacity month to month and the new success rate continues to remain the same after implementing the BA's recommendation, what is the average number of successes per month for the mortgage closure process, if the current process capability were increased by 50%?
A national branch of a global company is struggling to improve business processes of its Public and Government Affairs (PGA) department. To work with external stakeholders effectively, PGA employees need to collect, manage, and exchange a vast amount of information. Complex cases involve collaboration of many employees from different departments. The ability to share information and to coordinate corresponding activities is crucial for the company's growth plans. Their current tools and practices do not serve the purpose well. The existing system, which was deployed a couple of years ago, has only a few active users. The majority of PGA employees avoid using it because the system is hard to use and lacks needed functionality. Consequently, available information is mostly unstructured and stored either locally or on a shared network drive. Some of the information exists only in a paper form.
The branch's PGA head, who sponsors the project, wants to implement a configurable solution that two other branches successfully deployed several months ago. Both deployments were done by three solution consultants, who will be available to assist in the project. They will be responsible for tailoring the solution to PGA needs, as well as for training the PGA staff. With their help, the sponsor plans to complete the project in approximately three months.
The solution consultants reside in another country 7 hours ahead of the rest of the project team. They will be available part-time, but are planning two one-week long trips to the PGA central office to conduct initial training and to participate in the final deployment of the system into production. The consultants, in turn, expect a business analyst (BA) to assist in collecting necessary data and defining customization requirements.
The solution consultants have composed a spreadsheet with all requirements that are already implemented in the solution. The requirements in the catalog are organized partially by user tasks and partially by system features. The branch has distinct definitions of PGA user roles and uses a different approach to structuring requirements specifications.
How should the BA organize the customization requirements?
A business analyst (BA) is planning for an upcoming solution based on a signed contract with a client but has learned that one of the key subject matter experts is unavailable during the first half of the business analysis phase. The project has a tight timeline and firm deadline that is part of the contract. There are no substitutes for the key subject matter expert.
How should the BA proceed?
A very large insurer of General Liability and Property Damage insurance has an upward trend of increased claims over the past 5 years.
The Risk Control Area for that company has just completed a 12 month Pilot of a new improved Risk Control Site.
The purpose of the site is to help their customers manage their exposures and ideally prevent them from having claims There were 100 customers that were part of the Pilot that represented 25 different industries. The business goals were to increase use of the site and provide tools to help customer awareness of their exposures, so that they may reduce existing exposures and ultimately reduce claims.
The sites Features were as follows:
* Improvements to the search engine to all customers to search for articles, tools and services on the site
* A checklist function that allow customer to create their own unique Checklists or utilize a sample provided by ABC company to use daily, weekly etc. for an area of their facility.
* A promotion feature - where Risk preventing Articles, and tools on the site are marketed toward a customer.
* A profile section allowing for Customer Name, Address and contact Phone number.
Alter the 12 month pilot the business sponsor received an assessment of what was working and what was not. The Assessment of the pilot revealed overall site activity had significantly increased, however only 5% of the time the promotions were viewed. And the most shocking was that total claims increased by nearly 20% for these 100 customers during the pilot period. The business sponsor was perplexed as he had an expectation of reduced claims and at least for 30% viewing of promotions since the project team had spent a lot of careful time and effort on this feature. A BA was assigned to do further analysis regarding the low use of the promotions and why claims were not being reduced.
Regarding the use of promotions the BA looked into other similar companies to see what they did differently to get their customer to look at their promotions. The BA found that similar companies had promotions that targeted the industry the customer was in so it was more relevant to them and they were more interested to view the promotion. In addition the BA sent out a survey to all 100 pilot customers asking probing questions about what they thought of the site and if they felt it had decreased their exposure to risk sufficiently. The Survey responses came back with raving positive comments and providing examples of how the site had been helping in the reduction of claims from the customer's perspective. In addition the survey also revealed insight that the customers found the promotion often irrelevant to their industry.
The BA asked for a dump of all documentation of the 1000 claims that were filed over the 12 month pilot period. The BA found the nearly 90% of the claim filed were all in one region of the country and were all for property damage related to several severe winter storms in the region and the claims were nearly all unavoidable by the customers. The BA brought all this analysis back to the business sponsor and made the recommendation to the business sponsor to require the customer to select 1 of 25 industries in their profile. This would in turn allow for the ability to show industry specific promotions and promote search results relative to a customer's industry to be sorted at the top giving the customer a more personalized experience.
What technique was the BA using to understand why the promotions were not being viewed?
Stakeholders have indicated concerns with the level of uncertainty they are willing to accept with the solution.
What type of analysis can the business analyst (BA) use to alleviate these concerns?
A non-profit utility company has 900 employees, a majority of whom are hourly employees and must track their time using a paper based process. A few years ago, the Director of Human Resources purchased a software system to eliminate the current paper-based time reporting process. No requirements specific to the utility company were defined prior to the purchase. A team was formed to implement the software. During implementation process, the team discovered the software lacked functionality and was not robust enough to support the general ledger requirements The company stopped the effort and incurred a 1500.000 USD loss on the cost of the software.
This year, the Director of Finance requested that a team investigate the current paper-based time reporting process and recommend solutions. The Director of Finance feels that the Director of Human Resources must be involved as a critical stakeholder The Director of Human Resources is still bitter about the last effort because the process stopped.
During a design review meeting to discuss the future state, all stakeholders are in agreement except the Director of Human Resources. Who makes the final decision?
A solution implemented three months ago has decreased performance as the volume of transactions has increased. A business analyst (BA) is tasked with analyzing the performance of the application and providing recommendations.
What actions does the BA need to take?
