Business Analysis Modelling and Design
School of Computing and Information Systems
Business Analysis Modelling and Design ISYS90049
Raffaele Conforti & Marcello La Rosa © University of Melbourne 2018 Semester 2, 2018 1
Prescription Fulfillment Process
School of Computing and Information Systems
Business Analysis Modelling and Design ISYS90049
Raffaele Conforti & Marcello La Rosa © University of Melbourne 2018 Semester 2, 2018 2
Executive Summary Prescription Fulfillment is one of the main sources of income for HealthCareOnDemand. For a small company such as HealthCareOnDemand, providing an efficient and cost-effective fulfillment of orders is essential in order to be competitive. Recent customer complaints raised concerns about the efficiency of such process which may jeopardize the future of the company. This report provides an analysis of the prescription fulfillment process and shows that such concerns are unfounded.
Introduction HealthCareOnDemand is a health-care company providing its customers with a variety of services and products in the context of health care. In order to maintain its position as the best health-care company in Melbourne, it is essential to have effective and efficient processes. This report investigates how prescription orders are fulfilled by HealthCareOnDemand and provides an analysis of its process performance via the use of process simulation.
Governance Structure The prescription fulfillment process is one of the core processes for HealthCareOnDemand. In following we present the process architecture for HealthCareOnDemand. The core processes of the organization are the prescription fulfillment process, drugs procurement, medical certificate process, and the medical consultation process. The company also have few management processes making decision on market strategies and managing the IT infrastructure. Finally, support processes with cover HR, Logistics and Customer Support.
School of Computing and Information Systems
Business Analysis Modelling and Design ISYS90049
Raffaele Conforti & Marcello La Rosa © University of Melbourne 2018 Semester 2, 2018 3
The expanded version of the prescription fulfillment value chain is provided in the figure below:
The value chain is constituted of five parts:
1. Receive order: dealing with steps ranging from receiving the order from the customer to record the details of the order in the order management systems;
2. Verification: dealing with the retrieval and verification of the prescription; 3. Packaging: dealing with the preparation of the package to be sent to the customer; 4. Payment: dealing with invoicing the customer or the insurance company for the cost of the
drugs; 5. Shipment: dealing with the delivery of the order.
Modelling Conventions In order to provide an easy to read process model we adopted the following modelling conventions:
• XOR gateways were used when a mutually exclusive decision was required. • AND gateways were used when multiple paths needed to be executed at the same time. • Activities were used to model action performed by an actor. • Start event was used to model the start of the process. • End events were used to model the end of the process. • Model flows from left to right, top to bottom. • Events, Activities and MessageFlow text labelling adheres to the convention of the first letter
being capitalized with the following text lowercase. • Activities were labelled following the format imperative verb + noun. • Events were labelled following the format noun + past-participle verb.
BPMN Model In the following we provide a BPMN diagram depicting the prescription fulfillment process, when customer and insurance company have been modelled as black box (collapsed pools) since their behavior is not relevant for the purpose of this analysis.
School of Computing and Information Systems
Business Analysis Modelling and Design ISYS90049
Raffaele Conforti & Marcello La Rosa © University of Melbourne 2018 Semester 2, 2018 4
School of Computing and Information Systems
Business Analysis Modelling and Design ISYS90049
Raffaele Conforti & Marcello La Rosa © University of Melbourne 2018 Semester 2, 2018 5
Business Process Analysis To assess if the concerns about the performance of the prescription fulfillment process were valid, we performed an analysis of such process via process simulation. The simulation has been performed using the BIMP simulator using the process model showed previously. We simulated a total of 500 instances. Since the company receives on average 500 orders a week, we used a fixed inter arrival rate of 0.21 minutes (i.e. 500 / (5*8*60) ≈ 0.21). The resources considered for the simulation count four roles: Accounts Officer, Delivery Clerk, Pharmacist, Senior Warehouse Officer, Warehouse Officer, and Data Entry Officer. Below are reported the details related to the resource pools.
Name # of Participants Timetable Accounts Officer 3 09:00 – 17:00 Delivery Clerk 3 09:00 – 17:00 Pharmacist 6 09:00 – 17:00 Senior Warehouse Officer 3 09:00 – 17:00 Warehouse Officer 6 09:00 – 17:00 Data Entry Officer 4 09:00 – 17:00
As part of the simulation we adopted a fixed tasks duration distribution for each activity and event. The table below reports the details for each single task and event.
Activity Name Resource Distribution
Type Details Approve Order Pharmacist Fixed 1 Minute Attach Invoice to Package Warehouse Officer Fixed 2 Minutes Cancel Order Data Entry Officer Fixed 1 Second Charge Credit Card Accounts Officer Fixed 5 Minutes Charge Full Price Accounts Officer Fixed 1 Second Checking Coverage Accounts Officer Fixed 5 Minutes Checking Number of Attempts Accounts Officer Fixed 5 Minutes Checking Rejection Accounts Officer Fixed 5 Minutes Checking Safety Net Threshold Accounts Officer Fixed 5 Minutes Checking Package Content Senior Warehouse Officer Fixed 5 Minutes Checking Prescription Requirement Pharmacist Fixed 20 Minutes Checking Prescription Validity Pharmacist Fixed 5 Minutes Create Order Entry Data Entry Officer Fixed 5 Minutes Enter Item Details Data Entry Officer Fixed 15 Minutes Issue Refund Data Entry Officer Fixed 5 Minutes Notify Customer Accounts Officer Fixed 5 Minutes Order Received Data Entry Officer Fixed 1 Second Prepare Invoice Accounts Officer Fixed 2 Minutes Prepare Package Warehouse Officer Fixed 5 Minutes
School of Computing and Information Systems
Business Analysis Modelling and Design ISYS90049
Raffaele Conforti & Marcello La Rosa © University of Melbourne 2018 Semester 2, 2018 6
Request Prescription Pharmacist Fixed 2 Minutes Ship Package Delivery Clerk Fixed 10 Minutes Update PBS Entry Record Accounts Officer Fixed 2 Minutes Wait 1 Hour Accounts Officer Fixed 15 Minutes
Finally, the table below report the split probability of each gateway.
Gateway Outgoing Arc Probability
XOR - 85% Request Prescription 15%
XOR Check Safety Net Threshold 30%
Prepare Invoice 50% none 20%
XOR Update PBS Entry Record 40% - 60%
XOR Check Number of Attempts 5% - 95%
XOR Wait 1 Hour 30% Notify Customer 70%
School of Computing and Information Systems
Business Analysis Modelling and Design ISYS90049
Raffaele Conforti & Marcello La Rosa © University of Melbourne 2018 Semester 2, 2018 7
Simulation Results The results of our simulation showed that the processing of an order requires on average between 5 minutes to 6.5 hours with a maximum cycle time of 2.7 day, as can be observed from the two histograms below.
Additionally, when considering the resource utilization, we can observe that none of them is overutilized (it is actually the opposite) which indicates that the current system is able to handle a larger number of orders without negatively impacting quality of the service offered to customers.
Conclusion HealthCareOnDemand has been successful in acquiring a share of the Melbourne market thanks to its cheap online services. While this is the case at the moment, if HealthCareOnDemand wants to maintain such predominance it is of the upmost importance that customers are served in the most efficient and timely manner. The result of this analysis clearly shows that processing time for the Prescription Fulfillment Process is within acceptable ranges and it should not be cause for concerns. On the basis of these results we recommend HealthCareOnDemand to reduce its investment in human resources as at the moment a large number of its employees are underutilized.
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Simulation Results
General information
Completed process instances 500 Total cost 0 EUR Total simulation time 1.3 weeks
Charts
IndividualAssignmentError.bpmn Active BPMN file
Process cycle times including offtimetable hours
0 150 300 450 600
5 m 6.5 h
6.5 h 12.9 h
12.9 h 19.3 h
19.3 h 1.1 d
1.1 d 1.3 d
1.3 d 1.6 d
1.6 d 1.9 d
1.9 d 2.1 d
2.1 d 2.4 d
2.4 d 2.7 d
Process cycle times excluding offtimetable hours
0 250 500 750 1,000
5 m 5 m
Process waiting times
0 250 500 750 1,000
0 s 1 s
Process costs (EUR)
0 250 500 750 1,000
0 1
Home (/) Simulator (/simulator) Products (/products-and-services)
Help (/help) Contact (/contact)
Process instance cycle times including off-timetable hours
Minimum cycle time 5 minutes Maximum cycle time 2.7 days Average cycle time 24.2 minutes
Process instance cycle times excluding off-timetable hours
Minimum cycle time 5 minutes Maximum cycle time 5 minutes Average cycle time 5 minutes
Process instance costs
Minimum process cost 0 EUR Maximum process cost 0 EUR Average cost 0 EUR
Activity durations, costs, waiting times, deviations from thresholds
Waiting time Duration Duration overthreshold Cost Cost over threshold
Name Count Min Avg Max Min Avg Max Min Avg Max Min Avg Max Min Avg Max Cancel Order 500 0 s 0 s 0 s 1 s 1 s 1 s 0 s 0 s 0 s 0 0 0 0 0 0 Issue Refund 500 0 s 0 s 0 s 5 m 5 m 5 m 0 s 0 s 0 s 0 0 0 0 0 0
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Resource utilization %
0 5 10 15 20
Accounts Offi…
Pharmacist
Delivery Cllerk
Warehouse…
Dara Entry O…
Senior Ware…
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