Quick Jet, Inc., provides air taxi service to the wealthy, including celebrities, sports stars, and business executives. This case describes how the lease and maintain their planes. Quick Jet employees negotiate long-term leases with airplane leasing companies. Each lease involves one plane. Planes are added to the database when first leased, but each plane could be leased multiple times. Quick Jet categorizes its planes according to passenger capacity and normal flying range. Quick Jet makes monthly lease payments for their plane leases. If they lease multiple planes from the same lease company, they combine payments.

Maintenance. The company has no maintenance staff of its own, so it also contracts with a number of airplane maintenance companies to perform the routine maintenance required to keep its fleet airworthy. It issues orders against the contracts for specific maintenance required for the planes. To comply with FAA regulations, it tracks the details of the specific maintenance performed on each plane. To facilitate the tracking, each maintenance order specifies the maintenance services for one plane. Quick Jet pays for all the maintenance performed by each maintenance contractor within 15 days according to the terms of the contracts and may combine payments.

Miscellaneous Purchases. Quick Jet also provides each of its pilots with credit cards so they can purchase fuel and miscellaneous supplies at the various airports they use. The pilots turn in detailed lists of their purchases that identify the supplier, the date, the amount purchased, and the prices, as well as the plane for which the items were purchased. Each list is assigned a miscellaneous purchase number (misc. purchase #). Quick Jet pays the credit card bills in full each month upon receipt from the credit card company.

Other Information. Quick Jet keeps information about the plane leasing companies, the plane maintenance contractors, miscellaneous suppliers, and the credit card companies in one vendor file. However, it tracks plane leases, maintenance contracts, maintenance orders, and miscellaneous purchases separately (separate events). Quick Jet categorizes their employees according to their job assignments, e.g., pilots, purchasing employees, A/P clerks. It also categorizes vendors according to the services/goods they provide. It puts information about its agents, resources, and type images in the database before linking to other classes.

Required:

a. Draw a BPMN activity diagram that describes the Quick Jet’s purchases and payments process. Then, answer the following questions based on your BPMN diagram and this general BPMN diagram of the purchases process.

1. Focus on the plan leasing activities described in the case. Which of the following best describes a reasonable change to the BPMN above that would show the repeated payments to the lease company?

• Change the Select Vendor task to Select Lease Company.

• Add a gateway between the Determine Requirements task and the Select Vendor task to branch if leasing funds are not available.

• Add an intermediate timer event before the Pay Vendors task.

• Change the Pay Vendors task to a looping task.

• All of these.

2. Assume that you are combining all three types of purchases in one BPMN diagram. Which of the following best describes how you would modify the diagram above?

• Change the Select Vendor task to a looping task so that it loops over all three vendors.

• Change the Place Order task to a collapsed subprocess.

• Add an exclusive gateway to show that the process can take three different paths.

• Add an intermediate error event to the Place Order task to branch if a different vendor is needed.

• None of these

3. Assume that you added an intermediate timer event before the Pay Vendors task. How would that event affect token flow through the process?

• The token would wait at the event until time to proceed.

• The token would proceed to the Pay Vendors task immediately.

• The token would branch if there is an error in the process.

• The event would generate two tokens.

• None of these.

4. Assume that the diagram includes an intermediate error event attached to the boundary of the Select Vendor task. How would that event affect token flow through the process?

• The token would wait at the event until time to proceed.

• The token would proceed to the Pay Vendors task immediately.

• The token would branch if there is an error in the process.

• The event would generate two tokens.

• None of these.
   

Determine Select Place Record Pay Require- Vendor Order Purchase Vendors ments Start Purchases