Reengineering of Press Distribution Monitoring in Greece: an Initiative of Greek Secretariat General

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Reengineering of Press Distribution Monitoring in
Greece an Initiative of Greek Secretariat
General of Communication and Information

• G. Kourlimpinis, gkour_at_epu.ntua.gr
• School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Decision Support Systems Lab (EPU-NTUA)
• Greece

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What is a Business Process?

• A group of logically related tasks that use the
  firm's resources to provide customer-oriented
  results in support of the organization's
  objectives
• 3 key issues

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What is Business Process Reengineering? A
Definition

• Reengineering is the fundamental rethinking and
  redesign of business processes to achieve
  dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary
  measures of performance, such as cost, quality,
  service and speed.
• (Hammer Champy, 1993)

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Typical Reengineering Project Life-Cycle
Analyze As-IS
Identify Process
Design - Implement To-BE
Test Document - Results
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Helping the DefinitionBPR is Not

• Automation
• Downsizing
• Outsourcing

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Why Reengineer ?Systemic View

• All processes are simple efficient when
  originally
• designed
• User-friendly
• Deploying contemporary tools techniques
• Processes become complex inefficient with
  passage of time
• addition of sub-processes to handle exceptions
• changes in environment
• increase in customer expectations
• increase in volumes

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Why Reengineer?Business View

• Customers
• Demanding
• Sophistication
• Changing Needs
• Competition
• Local
• Global
• Change
• Technology
• Customer Preferences
• Performance, BPR seeks improvements of
• Cost
• Quality
• Service
• Speed

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Why Reengineer? Symptoms of Poor Processes

• Extensive information exchange, data
• redundancy and re-keying
• Huge inventory, buffers and other assets
• Too many Controls and Checks
• Rework, Iteration Duplication of work
• Complexity, Exceptions Special cases

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Why Organizations Dont Reengineer?Risks and
Pitfalls

• Complacency
• Political Resistance
• New Developments
• Fear of Unknown and Failure

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Key IssuesGoals and Achievements

• Viable Solutions
• Process improvements must be viable and practical
• Balanced Improvements
• Process improvements must be realistic
• Interoperability
• Processes implicate various organizations, each
  one having its own legacy processes

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Interoperability3 types of Interoperability
issues

• Technical (physical) interoperability involves
  the ability to share and exchange data. It
  requires data definition, a prior agreement on
  terminology, coding structures etc.
• Informational (semantic) interoperability
  involves the ability to share and exchange
  meaning. It requires data mapping, definitions
  and description of context.
• Organisational (business) interoperability
  involves the ability to share and exchange tasks,
  obligations and commitments. It requires data use
  rules, axioms etc.

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The Greek Secretariat General of Communication
Secretariat General of Information

• www.minpress.gr/minpress
• Monitors Law and its application regarding Radio
  and Television mass media
• Applies Law regarding licensing and operation of
  Mass Media organizations
• Monitors and regulates Public Mass Media
  organizations
• Monitors and applies law regarding News agencies
  operation
• Monitors and applies law regarding Press
  Licensing, operation, circulation.
• Manages governmental funding to Press distribution

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The as-is process
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The as-is process
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The as-is process
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The as-is process
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The as-is process

• In the beginning of a year
• The editor applies for a yearly certification.
• The Secretariat affirms or not the circulation
  for the year to come.
• During the year
• The editor forwards periodically his issues, for
  all his subscribers, to the peripheral Post
  office, one copy is sent to the Secretariat in
  order to be registered.
• The peripheral Post office forwards the issues to
  the subscribers and the copies to the
  Secretariat.
• The Secretariat manually registers the issues in
  the database.
• At the end of the year
• The peripheral offices forward claims of payments
  to the headquarters.
• The headquarters aggregate the claims and forward
  a claim to the Secretariat.
• The Secretariat decides for the amount to
  reimburse to the post office.

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as-is Process, Weak points

• This process embodies several points where
  tracing of activities is blurred, introducing
  errors to the path and accumulated further on.
• Firstly, the editor sends issues without any
  control, the only way to know if a specific issue
  should have been sent is when it arrives at the
  Secretariat, but then it is already late because
  the post office has already funded the
  distribution and will claim for that amount.
• Secondly, having no standardized way to refer to
  issues, the claims made by peripheral offices to
  the headquarters and from the headquarters to the
  Secretariat are of an aggregative nature and
  cannot be broken down and analyzed.
• The interoperability during that old process
  was accomplished using unstructured data files
  and spreadsheets.
• Further on some other problems where apparent,
  not related communication between actors but
  concerning the work at Secretariat level, the
  registration of issues was a manual
  time-consuming procedure and also data entry
  errors were easily introduced.

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The to-be process
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The to-be process3 reengineered computer
enhanced Interoperability Interfaces
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The to-be process

• In the beginning of a year
• The editor applies for a yearly certification.
• The Secretariat affirms or not the circulation
  for the year to come, sending also a printed set
  of barcodes, indicating the issues to be
  circulated during the year, based on the nominal
  periodicity for that specific press release.
• The Secretariat forwards a list copy of that set
  of barcodes to the Post office so that it is
  aware of the expected issues the year, thus it
  will deny circulating unauthorised issues,
  avoiding unexpected, by the Secretariat,
  expenditures.
• During the year
• The editor forwards periodically his issues to
  the peripheral Post office, every time an issue
  is circulated, a copy tagged with the
  corresponding barcode is sent to the Secretariat.
• The peripheral Post office forwards the issues to
  the subscribers, and the tagged copies to the
  Secretariat.
• The Secretariat registers the issues in the
  database using barcode readers, the issue is
  automatically registered and the corresponding
  barcode is marked as received, so during the
  year the Secretariat can monitor and not accept,
  unexpected issues.
• The Secretariat uses the system in order to check
  and validate canonical (periodical) issues
  circulation this is an important, value adding
  feature because canonical circulation is an
  important criterion of interrupting an editors
  right to circulate funded issues.
• At the end of the year
• The peripheral offices forward claims of payments
  to the headquarters. These claims are based on
  the list published by the Secretariat and sent to
  every peripheral office at the beginning of the
  year, so claims are based on cross-checking,
  initially expected circulations with ones
  actually implemented.
• The headquarters aggregate the structured claims
  and forward a claim to the Secretariat.
• The Secretariat decides for the amount to
  reimburse to the post office, electronically
  cross-checking lists with issues actually
  registered during the year.

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Interoperability and process improvement through
technology integration

• Barcode technology was used in order to support
  issues registration. A unified bar-code based
  mechanism was implemented in order to uniquely
  identify every single issue along its circulation
  among different organisations.
• XML technology was used when exchanging data,
  offering computer friendly files that are
  imported and manipulated automatically.
• Automated fax technology was used in order to
  accelerate information dissemination, faxes are
  generated and sent by the system in order to
  inform editors about the acceptance or not of
  their application, to inform editors and post
  offices about the expected issues of the year, to
  inform editors about interruption of their
  certification.
• Advanced data manipulation techniques were
  implemented in order to cross-check claimed
  issues circulation with actual registered issues
  and also to check the issuance periodicity.

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Results and Perspectives

• Strong Points
• Back office system of Press Department of the
  Secretariat has been fully reorganized
  eliminating paper work.
• Data exchange and retrieval has been automated
  through XML structured Documents design and use.
• Monitoring of postal press distribution has been
  automated through Barcode stickers use and
  automatic updates to the Barcode Lists in
  peripheral post offices.
• Weak Points
• The financial part of the process (execution of
  the payment for the subvention of postal press
  distribution) has not been automated in the
  context of our software application.
• Perspectives
• Our project has enabled the press distribution
  monitoring and the proper interoperability
  between all the contributors of the process.
  Further development plans include the fully
  automated payment for the subvention of postal
  distribution enabling connection services with
  e-banking infrastructures.