SCHOOL OF COMMERCE

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Date of Submission: ________________Lead Tutor: Solomon Markos (PhD)

General Directions:

 Please don’t forget to write your name and your instructors name;
 Deadline is highly respected.
 Address each question by providing relevant and accurate answers.
 Consult reliable sources and provide full information of the sources you have used to deal
each question. Use proper citation for books, articles, Internet, and company manual
sources.
 Produce your answer using Microsoft Word, Times New Roman font style, 12 font size,
double spacing, 1.5 inch right and left margins and 1-inch top and bottom margins.
 Leave ample spaces for general tutor comments at the end of each question.
 Check for spelling and grammar before you submit. Page limit: 5 pages
 The assignment consists of two cases. Read the cases carefully and attempt the questions
below the case. The cases are presented separately.
 This is individual assignment. Therefore, work independently. Although discussing on
the items with classmates is highly appreciated, it is strictly forbidden to provide the
same answers. Submitting the same TMA responses with different names is violation of
the School’s practices. Thus, they are graded zero.
Case study 1 : Ethiopian Mobile Telephony Market

The Ethiopian Mobile Telephony is one of the fastest growing sectors. Currently there are over
50 million mobile telephone service subscribers. The economic crisis due to rising loan which
account for 59% of GDP of Ethiopia, acute shortage of foreign currency coupled with the
growing pressure for mobile service have called for policy shift to liberalize the market and sell a
significant amount of share of Ethio telecom to foreign investors. Following this, it is expected
that other giant telecom companies would enter Ethiopian telecom market.

Vodafone is one of the world’s largest mobile service providers that have shown interest to enter
the Ethiopian mobile telephony market. The Company is based in London, United Kingdom and
has significant presence in more than 65major countries of the world.

The Company is known as Pioneer in starting 4G Service in Europe. The CEO of the Company
is planning to enter this lucrative Ethiopian Market. The management of the company have
approached your company for consultation.

(a) Suggest suitable strategy in terms of Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning in

(b) Also suggest suitable Promotional Mix for the Company.

With competition becoming seemingly tougher every quarter, companies are starting to
experiment with a series of interlinked technologies that allow them to optimize their business
processes and to react quickly when market conditions change.

These technologies are collectively known as business process management (BPM). They
include tools for business process modeling, workflow management, process monitoring,
enterprise application integration and managing organizational change, all of which greatly help
information to flow through organizations by coordinating and sometimes supplementing
companies’ key enterprise software packages, such as application suites supplied by SAP, Oracle
and Siebel.

A furniture manufacturer, for example, could plan how it wants its customer orders processed,
from initial confirmation to cash in the bank, using a process modeling tool that designs each
stage in the order’s evolution.

This tool then helps the manufacturer to create "workflow" software that automatically routes the
customer order – and all the work associated with it – to the right people and places, in the right
order. The workflow application takes decisions on how to advance the order, using pre-defined
business rules. It closely monitors the order’s progress, and if the order gets held up or seems to
encounter problems, it sends an alert in real time to the appropriate manager.

BPM has obvious advantages. Remodeled processes are usually more effective than their
predecessors, generating immediate cost savings and competitive advantages. MSB International,
an agency supplying workers on temporary contracts to companies, used BPM tools from Meta
storm to revamp its contract processing. Previously, each new contract took an hour of a
salesperson’s time to process after it was agreed. Now the work takes five minutes and is far less
prone to error.
Rob Marston, infrastructure manager at MSB, says the business benefit is "astounding". The
software cost £50,000 and generated a return of £100,000 within a year by making sales people
more effective, he says.

Just as importantly, BPM can help businesses change processes more quickly, perhaps with only
minor changes to workflow rules, which minimizes maintenance costs. "Hardly a week goes by
when we don’t change our business processes", says Mr Marston. “The board recently changed
some authorization procedures, and that took about ten minutes to implement. It sounds small,
but in the old days, that would have taken a week." BPM can help align IT infrastructures more
closely with business needs. "It helps to break down the traditional barriers between the business
way of describing a process and the IT way of implementing a process. That makes it more likely
that developers can deliver what the business is asking them to deliver", says Derek Payne,
fulfillment technology manager at Leica Microsystems, an optical product manufacturer.

BPM can also help organizations collaborate by aligning their business processes more closely.
As web services technologies start to make information flows between organizations easier,
supply chains should become shorter and more effective. "This helps to enhance the ability to
work outside your own environment with trading partners", says Mr Payne. Lastly, by defining
processes carefully, BPM clears the way for the radical outsourcing of entire business processes,
such as manufacturing or accounting. "The success of BPM will come less from allowing
business processes to be redesigned, and more from making it easier to source parts of the
business process offshore", predicts Will Cappelli, a research fellow at Forrester Research. Mr
Cappelli sees BPM as a Trojan horse for big IT services companies, enabling them to sell
business process outsourcing (BPO) to corporations. BPO is the fastest-growing service in their
market, and Mr Cappelli expects IT companies to absorb best-of breed BPM experts such as
Meta storm and Sterling Commerce to support this push.

Nevertheless, BPM is no walkover. As a complex set of technologies that do not always work
together easily, it requires great effort and discipline to implement. "The hardest part is
understanding the business processes," warns Mr Marston. "Initially, we tried to analyze
everything about each process, but either the analysis was wrong, or the business had changed by
the time it was implemented. So now we evolve our processes continually."
A big danger is that over-enthusiastic companies may use BPM to create too many new business
processes, says David Stephenson, European managing director of supply chain specialist
Yantra. "You can create a proliferation of business processes, and the simplification of your
business processes gets lost as a result. You have to keep a tight control over the design process",
Mr Stephenson warns.

BPM technologies are also not as sophisticated as some vendors claim. "Many people are going
to be sucked into an idea that sounds very seductive until they get into the detail", warns Rakesh
Kumar, a vice president of technology research at analyst Meta Group. "Integration between
technologies is a critical problem. Even if you have the technology problems solved, mapping
internal business processes to core IT processes is another problem." Gartner, the IT consultancy,
said in a research note in December 2002 that corporate satisfaction with BPM is already high
and is continuing to rise – making it a rarity in the IT world. Gartner urged clients to adopt BPM,
predicting that it would deliver them a 10 to 15 per cent return on their investment over the next
two years. BPM "will hold the key to creating new revenue opportunities and shortening product
creation processes", it added. Nevertheless, BPM is no panacea. Businesses must educate their
staff and trading partners carefully about the changes it will bring to the business, or resistance to
change – whether conscious or not – will emerge.

Questions

1 How does the article suggest that business thinking and practice has evolved since the
exhortations for business process re-engineering in the 1990s? (8 marks)

2 Summarize the benefits for BPM discussed in the article (4 marks).

3 Discuss the need for a concept such as BPM when all new information systems and
information management initiatives are ultimately driven by process improvement (8 marks).