2.1 Description of Your organisation

After Jim Penman has signed his very first franchisee in 1994, the cleaning group has had tough times in many years. The business has gotten recovered until the leadership was handed to Haydar Hussein. Since then, Jim’s Cleaning has made significant progress in advancing toward expanding its cleaning business in Australia. There are over 520 franchises under Jim’s group brand by now, and with the current booking estimation, the cleaning services will have approximately 65,000 new clients in each year (Penman 2016). Under the leadership of Hussein, Jim’s Cleaning franchisees have been developed into 6 individual and specialist cleaning diversions, including Jim’s Cleaning, Window Cleaning, Car Cleaning, Carpet Cleaning, Pressure Cleaning and Blind Cleaning (Penman 2016).

In specific, this organisation aims to provide a wide range of different types of cleaning services to meet any cleaning needs for clients by using trained cleaning teams, high efficient cleaning equipments and quality guaranteed services. Starting with Jim’s cleaning, a client can request for a free quote based on his/her specific cleaning requirements, then Jim’s will offer the flexibility of cleaning time and cleaning service at a reasonable price that perfectly suits client needs. Further, the client is encouraged to discuss and ask any questions that may possibly impact on the desired/wanted outcomes.

Additionally to the whole Jim’s Cleaning Franchises, one of Jim’s carpet cleaning franchises is particularly selected to be a study target. Except for the owners of this franchise, there are around 10 employees to work and provide professional standards carpet cleaning services to the use of  commercial purpose as well as residential use.

2.2 Project Objectives

The objectives of this study is by analysing the current carpet cleaning process in Jim’s Cleaning Franchises and then identifying the relevant problems that need for change of this process, in order to deliver recommendations to improve and align the business goals with IT solutions and enhance the overall business outcomes by meeting the needs of business expansion in the future.

2.3 Business process description

This study is specifically focused on one of cleaning service based processes that is provided from Jim’s Cleaning Franchises – carpet cleaning. A brief description of this carpet cleaning process flow will be illustrated in the following section, and it is started with a customer enquiry. Customers with a need to have their carpet cleaned are going to initially request a quote and make a desirable appointment according to their specific cleaning requirements by choosing to call the Jim’s reception centre or make an online appointment.

If the option of online booking is selected, the customer is need to fill an online form to contribute on the basic information collection. After, the details of carpet cleaning requirements and the address of the customer will be asked, and then processed in Jim’s Cleaning reception team. In general, Jim’s Cleaning will have a customised quote and the time of visit prepared to comply customer preferences and offer cleaning services to suit the customers. And, noticeably, the final quotation is completely estimated based on the frequency of visits, visiting time and what need to be cleaned. Finally, the customer will need to get their payment done in order to complete the agreement of the service.

If calling option is more preferred, then the customer can dial numbers 131546 to Jim’s reception centre. After that, the reception centre has three major tasks proceeding, first one is to note down the address of the customer; next one is to ask all the carpet cleaning requirements; final one is to assign cleaning job to one of the franchise owners. In order to provide services conveniently and efficiently, the reception centre will allocate the job to the respective location of franchise owners that is relatively close to (or in) the approximate location of the customers. Next, one of the franchise business owners are going to be assigned with the job and they will need to finalise the booking with the customers by deciding on the best time to visit, offering the estimated cleaning prices and answering any questions customers may have. When customers are happy with their clearing appointments and the estimate of cost with that individual franchise owner, they are required to made a payment prior to beginning carpet cleaning service. Once the payment is received, the franchise owner will assign the cleaning employee team to get that work done within the required time.

2.4 Problem statement

Several problems are accordingly identified in current Jim’s carpet cleaning process. The purpose of this section is to summarise those problems that relate to the need for change, as well as their potential impacts on the development of carpet cleaning process. At the end, to enable Jim’s Cleaning can implement a best practice in a cleaning service based process and achieve the desired business outcomes.

• When a cleaning job is assigned to the specific franchise owners, he or she is needed to allocate the work to every single employee by calling. Apparently, this process of allocating the job is a huge waste of time. But even worse, some of the employees could not be reached by phone at a certain point.

• This randomly allocating job to any employees has caused limited or even no flexibility in arranging an attractive and well organised work schedule. Additionally, this job allocation process is hardly to distribute works evenly to each employee. As a result, it will definitely discouraging employees from engaging to the business. And employees are having negative emotions in their bosses. Besides, with a rapid growth in clearing services, it is expected to hire more employees. So, the current way of randomly allocating job will make it hard and impossible for the franchise owners to make appropriate allocating decisions, especially, when the total numbers of employees are getting bigger.

• All the records of transactions, payments and employee salary are organised manually by the franchise owners. Moreover, they need to store the record of an employee manually when every time he or she is assigned to a work. It is obvious that errors/ typos can be particularly worrisome in recording manually, more specifically, they greatly contribute to a monetary loss and employee dissatisfaction when an error occurs.