Before beginning this exercise, read the lecture, the chapters in the text and the BABOK® guide located in your online classroom, and the articles. Describe and explain the eight modeling types listed as techniques in the BABOK® guide. Use an example from the CWI Business Problem Scenario (or you may use one of your own examples) to demonstrate one of the modeling types you have described. The example can consist of a scenario accompanied by a graphic, or it can be a narrative that explains how the model was used in a specific situation..

lectures

Business Scenario for Cool Widgets, Inc. (CWI)

Who:

Cool Widgets, Inc (CWI), is a fictitious collection agency that is currently experiencing significant growth, which has greatly increased physical mail volume. One of CWI’s long term strategic goals is to strengthen its brand by streamlining internal operations. To facilitate this CWI intends to add employees and two new branch offices. However, with the additional business and projected growth, Cool Widgets needs a more efficient method for handling its rapidly expanding mail volume.

What, Where & Why:

CWI is in need of streamlining the receipt and internal delivery of mail for accounts payable (AP), accounts receivables (AR), and account collections (AC). These departments have the greatest number of manual activities in the organization because most of the physical mail that comes into the organization ends up in these three areas. The AC and AR departments have the largest portion of the incoming mail. These two departments are responsible for managing revenue, processing the payments sent in by customers, and remitting the funds to the client organizations.

CWI handles over a 1,000 pieces of mail on a daily basis. The mail includes letters, bank statements, checks, invoices, solicitations, UPS, Fed-Ex, and courier deliveries. All of these must be sorted and routed appropriately.

The task of sorting and promptly delivering the large volume of incoming mail is complicated by the frequent misidentification and misrouting of important mail pieces, such as invoices, payment advisories, wire confirmations, checks, and money orders. Many of these items are then delayed, misplaced, or lost in the shuffle. This results in lost revenue, late penalties, and many customer complaints due to lost payments and/or slow payment processing.

CWI needs to find a way to improve the process and determine the best method for addressing the issues – this includes looking beyond merely solving the immediate problem. Looking toward the future is especially important since CWI has plans to expand, and to shift some operations processing functions to the new branch offices where there will be no physical mail delivery activities.

CWI’s current expansion plan is to have 200 employees in three processing offices. These will be located in three states (CA, NY, NV) and connected via a WAN (wide area network).There are 100 employees in the corporate office in California and there will be 50 employees in each of the two new branch offices. CWI is also considering hiring remotely located collection employees in the future as the business continues to expand.

Your Role:

In this scenario you are the Senior BSA in charge of this analysis effort on the mail issue for Cool Widgets, Inc.