Modelling a process

'No one has ever asked me that before'. What was I asking? Well it was quite simple really. On Mon-day I had bought some flower pots and compost at the garden centre, and arranged for them to be delivered on Friday. Fine, that's part of the service they offer. But what I had done then was to go back a few days later and buy some more stuff, chairs this time, and ask to include them in the delivery that was still waiting to happen on Friday. This was not part of the model of their service. If I had just arranged a separate delivery of that second load of stuff that would have been fine, but I would have paid for the extra delivery and they might have dispatched it as a separate delivery. Merging it with the first delivery would save me money, make their delivery process more efficient, and it could also benefit their sales since being able to add more to my impending delivery is likely to entice me to buy more big, heavy stuff. As it was, although no one had asked such a thing before, it was a simple matter to dig out the old order and add the new things to it with a pen and then put the things in the holding shed with the other stuff. But the key thing was that this was an informal solution to the problem; Mike had to get Frank on the phone and they sorted it out between them, it was possible to grab a pen and add a few more things to the delivery schedule etc. With real-world processes like this you can do that, when the organisation gets bigger and when things get more rigour-ously set in processes it becomes more difficult, and no where is this more apparent than when a process is automated by computers. I recently had problems with the acceptance of my credit card for payment because the system would only approve the transaction if the credit card details matched those in the database and if the address details also matched. This meant that the person I was speaking to filled the details in and then pressed on a button to make the system try and match them. It then came back with a no or a yes. As my address is a bit vague and as the operator …