About Your Client

Unicorn Limited is a mail order company which markets a variety of consumer items. The business is experiencing some growing pain, especially in order processing. Some of their problems are as follows. The company is reaching a point where they are buried in paperwork on the incoming orders side, and it is becoming difficult to maintain their customer list, because of the volume of new customers. The database has lots of duplicate customer information that costs the company a lot in unnecessary postage. Because of the deficiency in managing customer data, many business functions such as marketing and customer service cannot be conducted effectively. Currently, the order processing and some other core business processes are partially computerized and scattered inside the company.

You work for an IT consulting company and the managing director contacted you for help. You have discovered and gathered the following informaiton about this potential project.

Business functions

The company is divided into several departments:

Marketing, who are responsible for sending out catalogues to previous customers, and for advertising

Accounting, who are responsible for banking incoming money and preparing reports about the financial position of the company

Orders processing, who are responsible for receiving and coordinating in-coming orders.

Dispatch, who are responsible for sending out completed orders to the customers.

Purchasing, who are responsible for purchasing new stock

There are 27 people in the organization, spread amongst the various departments. Each department reports to a manager who manages the personnel in the department.

Essentially, Unicorn receives orders for items by mail, phone or fax. Payment may be made by credit card, check or postal order. Orders received in the post may be paid by any of these methods. Orders received by phone or fax may only pay by credit card. No other payment methods are acceptable.

Order Processing

There are several order processing clerks who handle the incoming orders. All orders MUST be on an official order form before they can be processed, and the clerk who initially receives them must check all orders. Once the clerk has finished checking the order, he or she will initial the top right hand corner and stamp the order form with a date stamp.

Orders received by post are opened, and checked. Apart from ensuring that the form has been completed properly, the prices are checked against a price list, and the totals are checked to see they are correctly added. If payment is by check or postal order, this is verified too. Correct orders are placed in the Valid Orders Tray. Any orders that are incorrect in any way are placed in the Queries basket.

Orders received by fax are scrutinized in much the same way, and end up in either the Valid Orders Tray or the Queries Tray. If a telephonic order is received, the clerk fills in the order form on behalf of the customer, and places it in the Valid Orders tray (there should be no errors on telephonic orders!)

There is a clerk whose sole responsibility is to follow up on queries with incorrect orders. The customer is phoned, and when the problem is sorted out, the order can be processed in the normal way again.

There are two clerks who take the valid orders out of the Valid Orders tray and process the payment details. Essentially, they produce batches that go through to the Accounts Department for banking. Each clerk keeps two lists. The first is of checks and postal orders. The client's name and telephone number and the check (or postal order) details are entered on a list, and the check or postal order put in a pile. The order is then initialed and passed through to the Dispatch in tray. Credit card order details are entered on the other list for credit card payments, and these orders too are passed through to dispatch after being initialed. At the end of the day, a photocopy of the lists is made for filing, and the original lists and all the payments are sent through to the Accounts Department for banking.

Order dispatch

When the valid and paid order is received by the dispatch department, a picker "picks" the items that make up the order (i.e. collects them from the storeroom and puts them all on a pallet). When all items have been picked, the pallet with the order clipped to it, is placed in a queue ready for packing.

A packer working in tandem with a dispatch clerk services the queue of pallets. The dispatch clerk scrutinizes that all items are indeed on the pallet, and then proceeds to write out the postal slip by hand, while the packer packages and wraps the items. When both have finished, the postal slip is glued to the package. Unicorn has its own postage-franking machine. The parcel is weighed, and the required amount is franked and glued (in lieu of stamps) onto the parcel. The whole lot is placed ready for taking to the post office the next day.

Express delivery items deliveries are packaged in a similar fashion. Express delivery items require a courier form to be completed instead of a postage slip, and no franking is done. Duplicate copies of the forms are kept, batched daily and sent through to the Accounts Department, who will receive the monthly statement from the courier service, and will need to reconcile the statements with these forms before paying.

From long experience the clerks have learned that they should keep a record of every parcel sent out, so each clerk keeps a dispatch book, in which he or she records the customer, the date sent, the method used, and the pre-printed docket number, and the insured value which is on all the forms. In this way, queries can be followed up.

Once an order has been completed, the order form is stamped and initialed, and placed in the completed orders file.

Occasionally there will be insufficient stock of an item on the order form. If so, the rest of the order is packaged and sent out as normal, and the dispatch clerk fills in a "pending stock slip" which lists all the items which were ordered but not yet sent out. The delivered items are crossed out on the order form itself, and the slip is attached to the order form. These partial orders are then placed back in the Queries basket.

The clerk handling these queries will phone the customer, or send the following pre-printed postcard as follows.

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