Business Process Improvement: the Case of Volvo Trucks

Constantly changing Russian economy, growing car pool of Russia and changing customer preferences lead to increasing demand for improving services provided by automobile companies. During the last decades business process management, particularly business process improvement and business process reengineering, has become a widely used approach that assists companies to reorganize business processes structure in order to increase KPIs and follow customer needs. The goal of this bachelor thesis is to analyze the existing business process structure in the aftersales department of Volvo Group Truck Center Saint-Petersburg, specifically process on settling accounts receivable, in order to find out bottlenecks and provide possible solutions, being based on benchmarking the same processes in other companies out of automobile industry (PJSC Sberbank). Semi-structured interview of employees and participant observation will be used as the main methodology for collecting data to explore processes organization in the truck center, while business process mapping tool, being based onrole activity diagram will be used to visualize those processes. For seeking solutions, business process benchmarking will be conducted to gather information on structure of the same business process in other companies throughout different industries and to find out possible tools and systems that can be applied to the automatization of the settling accounts receivable process. After the completion of the research the BPI plan for Volvo Group Truck Center Saint Petersburg will be developed. Recommendations provided as a result of the research can be applied to other companies in automobile industry or other companies that provide B2B services.