BUSINESS CASE

Section 1    Executive Summary

1.1    Scenario

The Heat Engineering Co. is a family operated and owned business that serves customers in air conditioning and heating services and repairs. For more than 65 years, the main clients of this company are homeowners living in Western suburbs. The company’s services cover Western Springs, Hinsdale, Burr Ridge, and Indian Head Park, IL. Countryside and La Grange the Sprig and Heart of the company is on the business philosophy of serving its customers well. The company believes in treating clients in the same way as they would need them to be treated. The company has qualified heating engineers who visit the premises of their customers needing repair of faulty heaters or installation of new ones. 

The company has first to fill in paper forms containing the details of a customer before visiting the customer’s premises. When the engineer arrives at the premises of the customer, he or she diagnoses the problem and fill in the form so as to list the parts required for fixing the problem. By the end of the day, the engineer has visited some clients and returns the forms to the office. An office staff will them process the filled forms and send orders for the required parts. A follow-up visit to repair the heating system is them scheduled for another day using the new parts (Robertson, 2004).

 The current business process at Heating Engineering Corporation has been identified to have several problems. One clear challenge is the high amount of paperwork of conducting the business process. The company spends $ 94256.70 every year for the inefficiencies of using paperwork. Another problem is the plenty of errors occurring during the ordering for new parts. It is because engineers describe the required part that needs replacement as they fill the form and not refereeing the parts in numbers. Sometimes, the back office staff makes the ordering of wrong parts because he misinterprets the part description on the form. Sending parts back to suppliers also involve another expense or additional cost that is estimated to be at $74256.7 per year.

Also, the poor ordering of parts makes engineer turn up to the customer’s premises without the right parts. They end up not fixing the heaters and have to set another day in the schedule to correct the problem. This problem affects customer services and engineers end up wasting visits. When appointments get rescheduling, other customers become disappointed, and they cancel their contract services. The loss of business and rescheduling of appointments results in another additional expenditure to the business amounting to $ 282716.10 every year.

1.2    Anticipated Outcomes

By purchasing a software package that can be operated by a hand-held device, Heating Engineering Corporation will eliminate the disadvantages from paperwork involved in a business process. The handheld devices will be used by the engineers to make their exact orders without having to go through the back office staff. This option reduces paperwork in business processes and further lead to the saving of more than 94308.90 US Dollar a year. The saving is from the reduced payment of overtime to workers because of failure to complete a single task at a given time. Additionally there will be the saving of $ 62872.60 because of eliminating the placing and return of wrong orders by the back office staff. Another $62872.60 saving will be because engineers will be arriving on their sites with the correct tools and parts. It reduces the number of customers canceling their contract and the number of rescheduling appointments by the engineers. This step results from to improvements of the performance of the engineers and the general efficiency in conducting business.

1.3    Recommendation

 A project in PRINCE2 is a temporary organization meant for the purpose of delivering a business product according to the needs of a business. This organization will invest and set up a product so as to changes its day to day business activities. For this case and IT system mainly a software that can be in mobile devices will be introduced that will create solutions that meet the specific requirements of the solutions.

 The new software system will be used by the engineers in placing orders and undertaking other usual activities of the business so that the business benefits in saving money and time. The new system will change the daily business operations. The improvements from the changes measurements will be in terms of benefits of PRINCE2

1.4    Justification

The Principles of PRINCE2 are the bedrock of this project. The first principle of PRINCE2 is that a business needs to have a continued justification of the business. It means that a project has to align with the objectives of a business and meet the needs of customers in an organization. Thus, the implementation of the new technology will ensure that the organization keeps on supporting the objectives of the organization and ensures the project is working towards the terms of the corporate strategy. Also, the new project will ensure that customer satisfaction continued to justify the existence of this business. Thus, by the use of PRINCE2 principles we can make investment decisions that justify if a project is worth being invested in and other ongoing investment decisions. Thus, the introduction of new IT software for the engineers handsets justifies the worth of this investment. It will help in  retaining clients, saving money and improving customer satisfaction which lead to increased revenues (Ward, Daniel, and Peppard, 2007).

Section 2    Business Case Analysis Team

2.1    Governance

Role    Description    Name/Title

Executive Sponsor     Provides executive support for this project    Mary-Anne Jones – VP Operations

Technology support     Will provide all the necessary technological support in this project    Smith Mathew – Information Technology specialist.

Improvement of business processes      Will advise the team on techniques for process improvement      Alex Kinsley, a Process team leader

Project Manager    Manages project team and business case    Hassan Abdul, Project Manager

Software support    Will provide the project with software support    Ruth White, Software group leader

Section 3    Problem Definition

3.1    Problem Statement

The company faces a wide ravage of challenges that increase the overhead cost of doing business. These problems include a large amount of paperwork that needs a long duration of time processing it when placing orders. The paperwork was also results in numerous errors from placing the wrong orders and that engineers arrive at the premises of customers with wrong parts. All these problems for the company cost $ 439317.20 every year.

3.2    organizational impacts

Adopting the new software will result from too many benefits to the organization. First there will be reduced paperwork leading to cost savings of $ 439278 every year. There will also be saving of $62759.6 every year by reducing the ordering of wrong parts. Lastly, there will be saving of $28393.42 by reducing the number of rescheduling appointments and cancelation of products.

 Other impacts will include the lower morale by the back office staff because of the reduction of their overtime payments. Also, the business processes efficiency and timeliness will be improved that lead to customer satisfaction (Peppard, Ward and Daniel, 2007).

3.3    Technology Migration

 For an effective migration, the existing data in paperwork platform will be entered on to a new Web-based platform. A phased approach will result in no disruptions or minimal disruption of the daily administration, operations, and payroll activities. The first phase of migration will be the purchase of software/ idea. There will be the creation of the WP system in a web-based environment that IT development group will have to test. Phase two is the use of a temporary platform in a technology lab to demonstrate how the daily operations of filling the form on heating system requirements and placing orders. The platform will act as a backup. The IT team will then enter all the recent data on orders and customer requirements on the web-based platform. Step four will be to train the engineer on how to use the new web-based platforms for entering customer requirements and placing orders using their handset devices (Ross and Beath, 2002).

4. Project Overview

This section shows how the project addresses the business problem of Heating Engineering Corporation. It will show the objectives, goals. And project description. Other aspects include project constraints, project assumptions, milestones and performance criteria.

4.1 project description

Buying the software package will lead to reducing wrong orders, reduced paperwork, and reduced rescheduling of appointments

4.2 goals and objectives

 To eliminate paperwork

 Reduce rescheduling

Reduce wrong orders

To reduce overhead costs

4.3 project performance

 The performance of will starts by Reporting of the performance of the web-based system in terms of eliminating rescheduling, overhead cost, paperwork and wrong orders.

 Administration data will be measured by eliminating the back office staff work, and enabling engineer enter their data for orders (Nah, Lau and Kuang, 2001).

4.4 project assumptions

All employees and staff will go through training on how to enter data for reporting task and placing orders

 Fund from the company is available to purchase the needed software and hardware

Project has executing backing and support

All head departments will provide support for successful completion of this project

4.5 project constraints

The company has limited IT resources to support this IT initiative

 There will be limited support from software and hardware provider. It is an internal project.

4.6 major milestones

 The major milestone will be the loss of morale among back office staff members because of reduced overtime payments.

5. Strategic alignment

The business will meet its objectives of fulfilling customers needs through improving their satisfaction and encouraging the retaining of customers.

6. Cost-benefit analysis

Purchasing the software package will mean reduced paperwork leading to cost savings of $ 439278 every year. There will also be saving of $62759.6 every year by reducing the ordering of wrong parts. Lastly, there will be saving of $28393.42 by reducing the number of rescheduling appointments and cancelation of products.

7. Alternative analysis

 Other alternatives include: doing nothing to the current paperwork handling of business. This option results in continued cost from the existing practices that are $439138.00 per year. Another option is to train the back office staff to gain knowledge on various parts of heaters so as to know the required parts. The training is to enable them order the right parts needed by engineers. With this problem, there is needed for additional training that the company is trying to eliminate. This option will also not reduce paperwork, and the company will incur additional cost for paying staff overtime. 

References

Nah F, Kuang, J, AND Lau .L. (2001) Successful Implementation of IT Enterprise Systems. Management Journal.7 no.3, pp285 – 296.

Peppard JWard J and Daniel E. (2007) Managing the Realization of Business Benefits from IT Investment,  Quarterly Executive MIS, vol. 6, no.1,pp. 1-11, 2007.

 Robertson S. (2004) the Business Case and Requirements, IEEE Software, pp. 93-95.

Ross J and Beath C (2002)Beyond the Business Case: New Approaches to IT Investment.  MIT Sloan Management review, vol. 43, no.2, pp. 51-59.

Ward J.,  Peppard J. Daniel E. (2008) Building Better Business Cases for Investments of IT-MIS Quarterly Executive, vol.7, pp. 1- 15, 2008.

Sherry Roberts is the author of this paper. A senior editor at MeldaResearch.Com in custom essay paper writing if you need a similar paper you can place your order from custom research paper services.