Question

A purchase request is initiated when an employee at the company fills in and signs a form on paper. The purchase request includes information about the good to be purchased, the quantity, the desired delivery date, the approximate cost. The employee can also nominate a specific vendor. Employees often request quotes from vendors in order to get the required information. Completing the entire form can take a few days as the requestor often does not have the required data. The quote is attached to the purchase request. This completed request is signed by two supervisors. One supervisor has to provide a financial approval, while the other supervisor has to approve the necessity of the purchase and its conformance with company’s policy (e.g. does a requested software form part of the standard operating environment?). Collecting the signatures from the two supervisors takes on average five days. If it is urgent, the employee can hand-deliver the form, otherwise it is circulated via internal mail. A rejected purchase request is returned to the employee. Some employees make some minor modifications and try in a second attempt other supervisors in order to get approval. Once a purchase request is approved, it is returned to the employee who initiated the purchase requisition. The employee then forwards the form to the Purchasing Department. Many employees make a copy of the form for their own record, in case the form gets lost. The central purchasing Department checks the completeness of the purchase request and returns it to the employee if it is incomplete. Based on attached quotes and other information, the purchasing Department enters the approved purchase request into the company’s Enterprise System. If the employee has not nominated any vendors, a clerk at the purchasing Department will select one based either on the quotes attached to the purchase requisition, or based on the list of vendors (also called Master Vendor List) available in the company’s Enterprise System. Sometimes the initial quote attached to the request has expired in the meantime. In this case, updated quote is requested from the corresponding vendor. In other cases, the vendor who submitted the quote is not recorded in the company’s Enterprise System. In this case, the purchasing Department should give preference to other vendors who are registered in the Enterprise System. If no such vendors are available or if the registered vendors offer higher prices than the one in the submitted quote, the purchasing Department can add the new vendor into the Enterprise System. When a vendor is selected, a purchase order is automatically generated by the Enterprise System. Then, a fax is generated and sent to the vendor.

Create a BPMN model for this process

Answer 1

This is Business Process Model Notation for a purchasing request that flows through four entities that is the employee, financial supervisor, policy supervisor and purchasing department

• Request intiaited when employee fills and signs a form and nominate vendor.
• Request sent to financial supervisor for approval, if rejected sent back to employee, if accepted sent to policy supervisor
• The policy supervisor checks the request for company policies, if rejected sent back to employee, if approved sent back to employee with approved status.
• The employee on approvement sends the request to purchasing department where they enter it in the company's enterprise system, selects vendor and creates a purchase order and fax it to vendor.