Assignment Details:

Quality and service excellence is the cornerstone of the University Library commitment to staff and students. Located throughout NSW and the world, libraries and access centres support over 20,000 students and staff, providing access to half a million books, over 106,955 journal titles, 610 databases (online collections of journal articles) and 246,450+ e-books.

The handling of delays for delivering books and journals back to the library today is very inefficient. The existing IT system is able to automatically send a reminder to the customer about the delay, but the handling of the delay is done purely manually by the librarians if the customer does not return the book or journal. The management of the Library has decided that the delay process should be managed by a business process management system. A business consultant interviewed a number of librarians about how they handle delays. The interviews result in a heterogeneous view of the practice of handling delays. The (hypothetical) scenario of handling a delay can be summarised as:

A delay can be recognised automatically by the existing library management system. An email will be sent to the customer automatically, requesting him/her to return or renew the book. If the book has not been returned a week later, a librarian will be notified by email. The librarian looks up the delayed customer in the IT system. If there is a phone number registered, she tries to call him by phone, else she writes a letter telling about the delay, that he already has received one reminder and that he will be charged a fee for the delay. If the book has not been returned a week later, the librarian will send another letter to the delayed customer informing him that he will be reported to the police for theft if the book is not returned. One more week later, if not returned, the librarian contacts her manager, who takes over. If the book is returned anytime during this period, the librarian will close this case and no further action will be taken.

If the delayed customer is a student, the manager contacts the academic registry department to suspend the student account. If the delayed customer is a staff member, the manager contacts the Personnel unit to suspend the staff payroll. After that, the manager attaches a fee payable to the customer’s account and request the customer to pay, which includes the cost of
the book and a late return penalty. The case will be closed by the manager when the charged amount is paid in full. When the case is closed, the manager will notify the academic registry department or the personnel unit to lift the suspension. Occasionally, the customer might return the book and also pay the fee in full. In this case, the cost of the book will be refunded. In some other cases, the customer returns the book without paying the fee. The case remains open but the amount the customer owes will be changed. Sixty days after the delay is first identified, if the case is still open, the manager change the status of the case to “forced close” and contacts a debt collection agency by phone to collect any outstanding fee.

You are employed as an IT architect for the library. You are responsible for modelling the above delay handling business process using BPMN. You will need to identify events, activities and decision points, and show the complete library private process and its interactions with external entities. Document your business process diagram using Bizagi BPMN modeller. Where the description is not clear, you can make your own assumptions. You will need to write a supporting document to clearly explain your process model and submit it with your project.