Q. What businesses are you using Questetra for?
WOM SYSTEM DESIGN is a system development company that specializes in warehouse management systems.
Speaking of warehouses, there are a variety of warehouses from clothing warehouse for the apparel industry to cold storage warehouses for groceries. The range of differences that a warehouse management system must absorb is vast, such as differences in terminal equipment used or differences in work procedures. Even if the name of the operations involved, such as product picking or inventory management, are the same, there are many differences.
We at WOM SYSTEM DESIGN are proposing “KURA STAR”, the best warehouse management system (WMS) for each of our customers, by modularizing the functions that are required at each step. We have introduced Questetra BPM Suite to standardize the internal procedures. I think that the sharing of information between the Management department and the Sales Force has significantly improved, because the progress of estimates, orders and billing can be monitored in real-time. ※ WMS = Warehouse Management System
Q. How many types of flow diagram are you using?
We are running about 20 different Business flows. Among them, 3 operations have the Business flow at their core, which are: Status Investigation – Approximate Estimate, Detailed Design – Formal Estimate, and System Construction start – System Start.
The first one is a free of charge procedure which the Sales Department carries out with a survey of the current situation in order to submit an approximate estimate. Final quotations for expensive cases require explicit approval by the Management department and the Sales Manager. The second is a Process to create and submit the system specification and formal quotation. This process incurs a fee, therefore it has been defined so that the process of receiving inspection reports and the invoicing are done by the Management department. The third is actually the process of building the system and deployment. This process has been defined up to the step where the invoice is issued by the management department.
From the point of view of order management, it has been defined as three separate flows. However, the required data is set to be shared (across the business flows) automatically. It used to be very difficult to capture the real progress because it was managed in Excel, but since it started being recorded automatically in Questetra the status of cases can be grasped very easily.
Q. Please tell us about the difficulties faced during deployment.
I think that there was confusion in the field, because conventional procedures which were not clear were standardized for the first time clearly.
For example, the details of the quote were closed to two of the developers and the Sales staff, but now we are required to register it in Questetra to get explicit approval. I guess there were many workers who felt frustrated that it was troublesome.
However, thanks to this verification rule, I found it has helped to significantly reduce ambiguous expressions in the quote documents. I think the internal information gap became less and reviewing the project became easier. In other words, at first there was a period when operational efficiency dropped, but now I can see the real improvement of the business processes.
Q. Do you have any expansion plans for the future?
To be honest, sometimes I felt there was a lack of features in Questetra a few years ago, and for a certain period I actually covered some processes with Excel. However, various functions of Questetra were enhanced in the last couple of years, and now I feel that it has features which we are not using now that I want to use.
We now would like to actively incorporate automatic processing in the existing Workflows (Process Models). Particularly, we are feeling a variety of challenges in managing formal documents, so we are trying to expand the automatic generation of PDF documents to more operations.
