Information_Systems_Essay

Information Systems Paper XXXXXX CIS/205 XXXX X, 2011 XXXX XXXXXXX   Information systems greatly affect the business process in an organization. To understand the impact we must first understand what a business process is. A business process is a collection of related activities that produce something of value to an organization, stakeholders, or customers (Turban & Volonino, 2010). For example, a business process can define how to stock raw materials into inventory or it may define the entire manufacturing process for building finish goods. The business process is the heart of any operations as it defines how to conduct business on a daily basis. The role of information systems is to affect these processes by improving their efficiency. The scope of this paper is to describe a business process within my current place of employment. This paper will also describe inefficiencies and improvements. Business Process Defined The student lending process is when a student applies for a student loan at a local credit union bank. Once the student applies for the loan, the bank will hand the student a packet of documents, which need to be completed and faxed. Once the faxed documents are received, the long tedious process begins. First, we have one person taking all the faxes received, which are in e-mail form and prints it on paper. At this point, the sorter has hard copies of the documents, and they proceeds to sort them by student number. A manila folder with the student number is created if the document is new or it is placed in the existing folder. At the end of the day, all these sorted documents are placed onto a cart and walked to the student lending department. The student lending department takes these vast amount of documents and begin the verification process. The verification process checks for document completion and errors. The student lending representative will call the student and discuss any of the aforementioned verifications. If the student is missing one document, the representative will make a note on the students file, another note on an excel spreadsheet, and file the students file. At this point, that student file is sent back to the sorter. The representative and the sorter will continue this iteration until the student file is complete and the loan is approved. Once approved the student file is moved to the approved file cabinet and therefore removing from the verification iterations. Business Process Analysis This process, in my opinion, does not have any strengths worth mentioning. On the other hand, it does have many weaknesses. One of the obvious weaknesses is that they are still dealing with large amounts of paper. The sorter spends too much time printing the documents, sorting them by student number, and finding the corresponding file. This process alone may take a couple of days. Another weakness is the transportation of printed documents from the sorting department to the student lending department. Another area of improvement in this process is the verifications. The entire business process for student lending is archaic, costs too much money, and it is inefficient. Solution After analyzing the entire student lending process, we concluded that we needed a document management system. We evaluated a couple of vendors and we concluded that either their product will not handle our process or it was just too expensive. The solution became clear; we would need to build our own document management system. In order to automate our existing process the system will need three important features: workflow, Optical Character Recognition and task list. To ease the cut over to the new system, the system will use the concept of file cabinets and folders. Each file cabinet can be assigned a workflow process and each folder can have a checklist assigned to it both defined by the system administrator. To improve the sorting process we decided to create a file cabinet named “Faxed Documents”. The workflow assigned to this file cabinet will automatically trigger the OCR process and identify the document type. The metadata for the document type will capture the student identification number, the type of document, and other important fields. Using workflow, the system will move the document to the corresponding file cabinet and into the students file and automatically check the document type from the folders checklist. It will send the assigned representative an email notifying them of the document received. Information systems affect the business process on any organization, whether they are a large or small. If an organization has a business process then systems can automate it. The key to automation is identifying the inefficiencies. Once identified, the right solution must be selected; this could be from a third party vendor or built in-house. In the case with the student lending process, the in-house system saved the company money and time. The staff was reduced, the paper was eliminated, and the documents are saved electronically.   References Turban, E., & Volonino, L. (2010). Information Technology for Management (7th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.