Reference no: EM132165475

Consider the following process for admission of international students at a university. Students fill in an online form including personal details, contact details, curriculum to which they are applying and some details about their educational background. The online applications are recorded in an information system and all staff members involved in the admissions process have access to all online applications. However, students do not submit documents electronically. Instead, they have to print the online form (a PDF document is generated after they complete the form). Students then sign the application form, and send it by post together with the required documents which include: • Certified copies of their degrees and their academic transcripts • Results of their official English language test (two types of English language tests are accepted: IELTS or TOEFL) • Curriculum vitae It takes on average 2 weeks for the documents to arrive to the students service by post. When the documents are physically received by the students service, they are checked for completeness. This check takes about 10 minutes. Sometimes some documents are missing. An e-mail is then sent to the student and the student has to send the missing or incorrect documents by postal service (this happens in about 20% of the cases). The students service then sends the certified copies of the degrees to a specialized agency (ENIC), which checks the degrees and gives an assessment of their validity and equivalence in terms the local education standards, which takes 60 minutes. This agency requires that all documents be sent to it physically (by post), and all documents must be certified copies of the originals. This is a hard constraint and the university cannot do anything to change it. The agency sends back its assessment to the university by post as well. The time it takes to send the degrees/transcripts to the ENIC agency and receive back a response is 2 weeks on average. About 10% of applications are rejected after this check. Notifications of rejection are sent by e-mail. The university pays a fee to the ENIC agency for each verification that the agency performs. After the ENIC check, the English language test results are checked online by an officer at the student’s service. This is done by entering a verification number that comes at the top of the test results sheet. If the validity of the English language test results is put into question after this check, the application is rejected. Checking the English language test results takes 10 minutes on average and is free. About 10% of applications are rejected at this stage. Notifications of rejection are sent by e-mail. Once all documents of a given student are complete and validated as described above, the applications are assessed by a committee composed of three academic staff members. Since the committee only meets from times to times, it takes on average 2 weeks between the time students service sends the copy of an application to the committee members (by internal mail) and the moment that the committee makes a decision (accept or reject). The committee takes its decision based on the academic transcripts and the CV. The committee takes on average 10 minutes to assess each application. About 50% of the applications received by the committee are accepted. Once the committee has made a decision, it notifies it to students service by e-mail. Then, student service notifies the outcome to the students. It takes about 2 days for the notifications to be sent (after the committee has notified their decision). Notifications are sent by e-mail and successful candidates are sent a confirmation letter by post. About 800 applications are processed per year. One of the problems faced by the university is that students have to wait too long to know the outcome of the application (especially for successful outcomes). It often happens that by the time a student is admitted, he/she has decided to go to another university instead (students send multiple applications in parallel to many universities). Not surprisingly, the manager of the students service has decided that enough is enough and starts an initiative to improve this process. a. List the process activities and classify the activities in the process into “value-adding”, “business value-adding” and “non-value-adding activities”. b. Create the "As-Is" process model. c. Calculate the cycle time of the “as is” process. Show all work. d. Calculate the cycle time efficiency of the “as is” process. Show all work. e. Do you think it is advisable to automate this process “As-is” using workflow technology? Why or why not?