MITS4001
Business Information SystemsAssessment Brief
CaseStudyandPresentation
July 2019
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Case Study Report (Individual Assignment) – 10% (Due week 5)
INSTRUCTIONS
For this component of assessment you are to prepare a report based on the case study below and
the questions that follow it. Your report should be limited to approx. 1400 words (not including
references). Use 1.5 spacing with a 12 point Times New Roman font. You should include
references in your report and these and must be in the IEEE style.
Case Study: Cutting out paper speeds up the process
The Chinese are credited with inventing paper nearly two millennia ago, and in spite of more
recentinventions,suchastheintegratedcircuit,computerisedstorage,andnetworking,itis
stillheavilyused.Soistheworldmovingclosertousheringouttheoldinfavourofthenew?
The paperless office has long been a dream, but can it be achieved?
LiverpoolDirectisdoingitsbest.ThecompanyisapartnershipbetweenBTandLiverpoolCity
Council,whichattheturnofthedecadewasseenasoneoftheworstcouncilsintheUKat
revenue collection and benefit payments. ‘The service was deemed tobe failing’, says David
McElhinney,chiefexecutive ofLiverpoolDirect,whichwasformedin2001tohelpmodernise
the council’s operations. ‘The average time to turn around a benefit claim was 140 days, and
therewasabacklogof50,000cases.’Thepaperwasholdingeverythingup.Eachweek,20,000
pieces of mail would arrive at the benefit office, including everything from benefit claims to
notificationsthatanindividual’scircumstanceshadchanged.Themailwouldbestamped,and
filteredthroughdifferentteamsdependingonwhatinformationithelduntilitreachedafile.
It would then be sent to more people for manual assessment. Bottlenecks would delay the
paperwork,andfileswouldbeburiedonsomeone’sdeskwhentheywereneededmost.’A
claimant might pay a personal visit, and we wouldn’t be able to locate their file’, Mr
McElhinney says. ‘The average wait was about two hours.’ Not only did the paper cause
significant delays, but also took up £750,000-worth of office space a year. Ridding the office
ofpaperbeganwithrefocusingthesystemaroundtheend-user.Aseriesof’onestopshop’
contact centres was set up tohandle customer queries and visits, and the organisation opted
for what Mr McElhinney calls a ‘single version of the truth’ – a single electronic document that
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can be referred toby all parties at any time. Now, when a document is received, it is scanned
andputintoadigitalfile.Datacanbeattachedtothedocuments, whichisarchivedinto
different folders by a dedicated team, based on the content. Software-based flags can then
be set for the document that can trigger actions necessary for that letter. One trigger might
cause a letter with a particular response to be generated, for example.
One ofthe biggest challenges when re-engineering a paper-based system isto minimise
disruption,butsomeinterruptionisinevitable.‘It’soneofthosesystemswhereyoucan’trun
things in parallel’, explains Mr McElhinney. The systems were turned off for six weeks, and
buildings including 15 post rooms where closed; one post room was retained to scan all
incoming correspondence; the paper storage building was sold in March 2006, generating
£4.5m for the city. Stripping away old ways of working was an important part of the project’s
benefits:‘Knowyourprocesses,andchallengethemtomakethemmoreefficient’,saysRoddy
Horton, central systems manager at the Hyde Group, a housing association with 1,200
employees serving more than 75,000 people. This month, the Hyde Group computerised its
recruitment process, stripping 58,000sheets ofpaper ayear outof thesystem.
Beforetherecruitment processwasdigitised, candidates would receive aninformation pack
and application form in the post. They filled in and returned the form and copies were sent
to the recruiting manager and up to five people on the review panel. The recruiting manager
would then fill out various forms following the interview and return them to human
resources, which would then send a decision letter to the candidate. ‘Now, all the details are
on the website’, explains Mr Horton. An online application form is logged in a database and
sent to the recruitment manager, who then electronically forwards it to the interviewing
panel. Once the decision is reportedto human resources, the candidate receives an e-mail.
The recruitment application is built on a database from Northgate HR that the company had
bought in 2001 to manage some human resources information. It then purchased ePeople, a
human resources application from Northgate that enables the company to provide a selfservice front end to the database. The developers built workflow rules into the system that
coordinated these communications electronically. The recruitment applications join an
already-deployed paperless expense claims and training request application, also designed to
strip paper from the system.
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Before the introduction ofthat system, paper-based expense claims and time sheetsneeded
to be signed bya manager, who would often beout surveying sites, dealing with housing
issues, or visiting other offices. ‘It might be weeks before you saw your manager’, says Mr
Horton. ‘Staff were not being paid on time, and they were also going to huge amounts of
effort to claim those payments.’
The electronic system handles those communications digitally, so staff enter their expenses
claims directlyinto the computer. The Hyde group also refined the expensesprocessby
making it possible within the system to request that another person sign a document, if the
first choice of manager was absent, for example. Both Liverpool Direct and Hyde’s projects
had a common challenge in getting people to change the way they work – especially senior
staff used to do things a certain way. Mr Horton found that electronically signing documents
was counterintuitive for many staff: ‘I had problems proving that an electronic signature is
just as sound as a paper one’, he says, explaining that employees ‘sign’ an e-mail in the
workflow system bye-mailing it to the server,which then e-mailsthe next person in the
workflow chain.
‘Sometimes, people can also be nervous of introducing efficiencies because they see it as a
job threat’, Mr Horton warns. He had to reassure several people as systems were rolled out.
But how much paper do such projects really get rid of? Neither of these organisations are yet
paperless. Liverpool Directhasachievedthe greatest success, having stripped about 70
percent of the paper from the process. None of the paper that is personally bought into the
one-stopshopcentresandscannedisretained,butanypostalcorrespondence isretainedfor
30 days after being digitised. The Hyde Group’s attempt at digital deforestation has been
more muted. Since the recruitment system was digitised, about one-third of its paper has
been eliminated. It hopes to increase that to 80 percent by digitising supplier invoices,
tenancy agreements, and possibly tenancy repair requests, Mr Horton says.
Nevertheless, even though an entirely paperless office may not be plausible, stripping even
this much paper out of the system can have positive effects. For example, in Liverpool the
caseload backlog has been reduced from 50,000 to zero, while the average processing time
forbenefitclaimshasdroppedfrom133daysto19.Abandonedcallratestoitscontactcentre
have dropped from 50percent to just 5percent, and the waiting time for personalvisits
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concerningbenefitclaimshasbeenreducedfromtheoriginaltwohourstofourminutes.
Hydewillalwayshavesomepaper,evenifitisnotstrictlyspeakingintheoffice.Thecompany
isreluctanttogetridofpaper-basedtenancyagreementsaltogether,andkeepsthemstored
inanoff-sitelocationforlegalpurposes.Nevertheless,withthepaperlessrecruitmentsystem
now in place, and with its previous paper saving efforts, it has eradicated 153,000 sheets of
paper a year from its operations.
In reality, the totally paperless office may still be as far off as the paperless newsagent – but
organisations cangoalongwaytowardsreducing whatthey useandincreasing theefficiency
of their work along the way.
Questions
1. Why is it important to strip away old ways of working when introducing systems
such as those brought in by Liverpool Direct and Hyde?
2. Using the Internet as a resource, locate information regarding a simple
document management system, such asScansoft’s PaperPort Office.How useful is
such a product likely to be within a department of a large company or a smallbusiness?
3. Whatisthe likelihoodthatthe paperlessofficewillever beachieved?
4. If a company implements a workflow management system such as the one
described in the case study, what would be the expected changes in the business
processes. What do you think would be the drivers for success of such a project?
Submission Guidelines
All submissions are to be submitted through turn-it-in. Drop-boxes linked to turn-it-in will be set
up in the Unit of Study Moodle account. Assignments not submitted through these drop-boxes
will not be considered.
Submissions must be made by the due date and time (which will be in the session detailed above)
and determined by your Unit coordinator. Submissions made after the due date and time will be
penalized at the rate of 10% per day (including weekend days).
The turn-it-in similarity score will be used in determining the level if any of plagiarism. Turn-it-in
will check conference web-sites, Journal articles, the Web and your own class member
submissions for plagiarism. You can see your turn-it-in similarity score when you submit your
assignment to the appropriate drop-box. If this is a concern you will have a chance to change your
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assignment and re-submit. However, re-submission is only allowed prior to the submission due
date and time. After the due date and time have elapsed you cannot make re-submissions and
you will have to live with the similarity score as there will be no chance for changing. Thus, plan
early and submit early to take advantage of this feature. You can make multiple submissions, but
please remember we only see the last submission, and the date and time you submitted will be
taken from that submission.
Your document should be a single word or pdf document containing your report.
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