Chris is a retired High court judge, who has received an award for providing free legal support to the local community. His daughter Patricia, who graduated in Law from Melbourne, supports her father in providing legal advice to the financially disadvantaged people. Most of the costs associated with the administration of services are met by the donations made by the local donors. Through word of mouth, many people from Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane cities who could not afford paid legal services offered by the other law firms started contacting them for legal advice. To meet the overwhelming demand and offer free legal advice in 3 metropolitan cities, Chris and Patricia recruited a total of 30 Lawyers and 18 administration staff, who are willing to offer their voluntary services to the needy.
After learning about their services, one of the anonymous donors came forward to donate $100,000 towards management of these services and promised at least $25,000 each year for the next 10 years.
CPLS currently has about 50 volunteers (including Chris and Patricia) in 3 branch offices and the details relating to services offered are recorded manually in books. Chris and Patricia are struggling to maintain books up to date. All this time, they did not think about using information systems because of the costs involved in purchasing and implementing computerised systems. Recently they have attended a seminar about ERP systems for Small to Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs), which explained the benefits businesses can reap with ERP systems.
Chris and Patricia are keen to use the technology and implement an ERP system with the help of an expert to record their client' details, services they offered, etc. They are planning to utilise the donations to adopt an ERP system. They believe that a computerised system will not only help them to record the transactions easily but also help them to generate reports to understand which Lawyers have offered services to clients each month, peak/off-peak times, list of pending cases, list of clients and their contact details, etc. However, they are not sure whether they will achieve the same benefits as SMEs.
An inspired CQUniversity IT graduate Simon, specialising in Enterprise Systems, wanted to support them by studying the possibilities of adopting an ERP system at CPLS. He believes that a Cloud based ERP system will help CPLS to record the details of available Lawyers, their advice to Clients and Cases that were handled by these Lawyers in different Courts which were heard by different Judges. Hence, they would like to explore the benefits and challenges associated with Cloud based ERP systems.
In his first meeting, Patricia has been informed that CPLS wishes to record the details of Lawyers including their names, address, bar council(s) they are registered to and their areas of specialisation. Each Lawyer is registered with at least one bar council and may be registered with multiple bar councils. Many of them specialise in multiple areas such as criminal cases, traffic infringements, etc.
Usually clients who wish to utilise these free services make an appointment with one of the lawyers and provide them with case details. Sometimes clients may have more than one case and may have more than one lawyer assigned for that case. Similarly, each lawyer may handle more than one case.
At the first appointment, Lawyers will assign an ID to each case they handle, indicate the area and record a brief description. Once the documentation is prepared, this case will be filed in (or assigned to) one of the courts which will be heard by the judge. If the case is filed in one particular court for hearing, then it will be heard by that court only unless the case is withdrawn.
As there are several courts, it is necessary to record court details such as Court_ID, Name, City, State and Postcode. Each court will have one or more judges and they belong to one and only one court at any given time. Each of these judges is identified with their ID and Name. Simon feels that storing Judges' experience would also be helpful.
Tasks Description
In this assignment, students should develop a case study report for CPLS, which includes:
Rationale for organisational changes
- Common reasons and considerations for organisational change in other organisations (from literature review)
- Reasons for changes in CPLS (from case materials in this assignment requirements, students may make reasonable assumptions)
Business processes
- Current business processes
- Proposed changes to the business processes, including use of ERP system
Considerations in making decision to go ahead with project
- Alignment of BPM, BPR and ERP with the CPLS's mission and goals
- Abridged feasibility analysis
- Risks associated with BPR and ERP customisation
Change management
- The organisational commitment
- Model, methodology or best practice related to BPM, BPR, ERP and risk management
Recommendations
- Proposed organisational changes in business processes
- Decision related to BPM, BPR and ERP
- Change management
In this assignment, you should show relevant knowledge you learned from this unit and to demonstrate your understanding on other required areas, through further research beyond the unit materials. For students wish to have achievement higher than "Pass" level, you should demonstrate deeper learning through extensive research on relevant academic literature and high quality industry sources. This is not a situation of having single version of solution or "model answer". Successful arguments could be made for different options. High achieving students would demonstrate their competence in critical thinking, including compare and contrast different perspectives and make good recommendations. Your task is to present a persuasive and argumentative piece of writing in report form.
Students are required to use academic literature to support and illustrate your report. It is important that you look at how issues and potential problems inter-relate and explain the linkages in order to present the issues and risks. For example, it is up to you to explain and justify why the issues and risks you identify may be a problem. Use literature to develop strategies or actions that can avoid or mitigate the risks. Be aware that it may not be possible to avoid or mitigate all risks.