Homework 1 (6 points)
Task 1. [3 points]
Note: This description is inspired by a real company, but the statements made here may be inaccurate or incorrect.
In its own words, Bolt ``is an Estonian mobility company that offers ride-hailing, micromobility rental, food and grocery delivery and car-sharing services. The company is headquartered in Tallinn and operates in over 500 cities in more than 45 countries in Europe, Africa, Western Asia and Latin America. The company has more than 150 million customers and more than 3 million driver and courier partners.''
Bolt operates in a highly competitive market, with thin margins and constant price pressure both from the side of clients (who demand low prices) and suppliers (contractors and partners) who demand more. Every drop of operational efficiency counts. Being a technology company, Bolt has automated many of its activities, but by far not all of them, and many of its processes involve manual touch-points. Bolt relies on a workforce of over 4500 employees worldwide, and growing. The management admits some of the processes have room for improvement.
Accordingly, Bolt has embarked in an effort to continuously improve its business processes, with a dual emphasis on efficiency and customer service quality. You have been hired as an analyst and will be part of the team that will embark in an effort to map the business processes at Bolt and to identify value chains that would most benefit from business process improvement efforts. Your team leader has been appointed directly by the CFO, who is a strong advocate of operational efficiency and sustained, long-term profitability.
Before your team goes around the company to collect information and to deeply understand its processes, your team leader has requested from every team lead to map the processes in the company (the "process architecture"), seen from the perspective of key external stakeholders, specifically its customers and its suppliers (contractors and partners). This initial "draft" process architecture should reflect what a client or a contractor or partner thinks that Bolt does, i.e. what matters to them.
Based on information available in the Bolt web site, and other publicly available information, your task is to identify the main process groups and processes of Bolt, with a focus on processes that deliver value to customers directly or indirectly. You must arrange them into a process architecture including core, support and (if applicable) management processes. You must also select three important value chain(s) in Bolt and capture each of these value chains (using the chevron notation or simply as a list of activities).
The deliverable of this task is a process architecture diagram. You can draw this architecture diagram using any tool of your choice (or on paper). We saw a few examples of architecture diagrams in Practice Session #2.
Your solution will be judged on how insightful it is. The main question we will ask ourselves when evaluating your solution is the following: To what extent your process architecture diagram helps the reader to easily understand what processes are performed in Bolt, knowing that the emphasis is on the perspective of its customers and contractors/partners.
You are encouraged to add a textual explanation of your process architecture, for example, to explain the key terms that you use in your diagram.
Hint: If your process architecture contains more than 25 elements (processes or groups of processes), it's probably too much. If it contains less than 8 elements, it's probably too little.
Task 2. [3 points] Model the following business process using BPMN.
Make sure your process model(s) follow the modeling conventions introduced in the lectures and that they abide to the syntax rules of BPMN, in particular those listed here (only the rules numbered "BPMN XXXX" and not the rules numbered "Style XXXX").
Please also make sure that you start by modeling the value chain of each process. We suggest to create a top-level value chain consisting of a simple sequence of collapsed subprocess activities. Each subprocess in this value chain should be decomposed into a separate BPMN diagram. Use lanes and pools in the subprocesses, where appropriate in the sub-processes (at the lowest level of the decomposition, not in the upper levels). There is no need for data objects, but they can be useful occasionally to represent major objects.
The textual description of the process given to you may contain irrelevant details, like for example the average amount of time it takes to execute a given activity, which is something that cannot be enforced in BPMN, though it can be optionally added as part of the documentation of the activity. It is part of your task to discern what should be put in the BPMN models and what should be left out.
Please package your process architecture and your process diagrams in a single .zip, .tar.gz or .7z file (or a single PDF file) for submission (use the Submit link in the course web page).
If you have completed the homework with another student (teams of two), please write the name of your team-mate in the "Comments" field of the homework submission form.
Please be reminded that plagiarism is any form is not tolerated. You can get an F in the entire course due to a small amount of plagiarism. Whatever you submit, it must be 100% the product of the work of you and your team-mate. For the same reason, do not share your solution or a partial solution with others (except with your team-mate).
GenAI tools are allowed, but if you use one, you must acknowledge that you have used GenAI and state which GenAI tool you have used.