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Reconstitution of the administrative process of printer cartridges procurement by using a Business Process Management System (BPMS)

Benioudaki Maria

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Summary

It is known that the Greek public sector lacks automation for the processes which take place within the public institutions, leading the employees to work inefficiently and to waste time in repetitive, sometimes even unnecessary, procedures. One of the mentioned procedures is the procurement of the compatible and genuine ink cartridges for the Technical University of Crete. The present thesis aims to automate the process of procurement by using Business Process Management.According to the people in charge of the procurements, the present process is outdated, since the users order their ink cartridges either by sending an e-mail or by making a phone call. This practice is time-consuming, because most of the times one email or phone call is not enough, while many times the users cannot correctly specify their printer’s model (or ink cartridge) leading to confusion and mistakes.For the present thesis, at first, the processes that take place in the procurement process were mapped and represented by using Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). Afterwards, the designed pro-cesses were configured and executed by using an open-source Business Process Management System (BPMS). Furthermore, by using this BPMS a platform (referred as Ink BManager) was created for both the administrators and the users. Within the platform users can log in and choose products from an extensive list of available printers, while the system automatically matches the compatible ink cartridges, whilst in case that a product is not within this list, the platform offers the ability to the users to add it. Also, the platform empowers the administrator to view the ordered products and to approve or not a given order. Since mistakes can occur while placing one order the system enables the administrator to reopen an order so that users can edit their already placed order. For administrator’s assistance the platform also gener-ates an aggregate list of all the ordered products, and it enables him/her to estimate the cost of the order, as well as to save the prices given from the supplier. Additionally, the platform gives the ability to the administrator to view the past orders and to keep track of the expenses based on a procurement period, a department or a user.Finally, in order to make sure that the platform would meet the expectations as a real-world solution, a pilot test was conducted between the members of the Technical University of Crete, and a survey was made in order to receive the users’ feedback.

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