CHALLENGES AND PROBLEMS FACING CSA

The textual process description facilitated the project team to identify the following core processes, which were captured in a value chain, as shown in Figure 3. This value chain should establish a common understanding of the business process and should help to structure all reengineering efforts.

Figure 3: Value Chain of the Business Travel Process.

The project team decided to skip over the development of as-is process models in order to save time, because the SAP R/3 upgrade project was to become finalized. A further argument of the project team was that process models become useless after the process analysis. The project team reported all findings and identified processes to Ken Blake, the business process improvement manager. The next initial project step would be the identification and analysis of organizational and IT issues within the business process. It needs to be investigated where resources are wasted, process steps can be automated or data digitalized. This analysis should be presented in a milestone meeting to general management, IT management and process management. After this milestone the IT management is supposed to undertake the final decision if the SAP R/3 Travel Management solution should be utilized or alternative solutions should be investigated.

Ken Blake has high expectations on the process analysis and from here derived alternative solutions based on best practices for Travel Management. Oppositely he is afraid that there will be still a high uncertainty about various issues which can not be solved or considered in the solutions, because simply insufficient data are available and the complexity is too high. One of his concerns is the high limitation by the travel policy. The project team is thinking to categorize all travelers into frequent, casual and nonfrequent travelers to establish travel profiles which will be treated in a same way. These travel profiles would determine the travel policy. To some extent Ken would also like to focus on an organization-wide corporate card solution for travel expenses in order to streamline travel expenses. The IT management of CSA informed Ken after investigations that it would be not a feasible solution to provide to every traveler access to the SAP R/3 system. This would cause enormous licensing costs for SAP R/3, which can hardly be justified to CSA's client departments ID and RD.