Flexplorer: Getting our Feet Wet
Lucy glances at her notebook on the table. She flips a page with a sketch of what looks like a design for some kind of electric offroad quad bike. The next page has a bullet list of notes and a couple of coffee stains.
"There’s three", Lucy continues. "We’ll start with the maintenance process."
You make a note to point out later that Flexplorer could benefit from using process names in VERB-NOUN form consistently and listen to Lucy’s description of the current processes.
Get Set Up for the Assignment
Using git
Checkout the flexplorer-assignment-1-start tag in the assignments repository.
git checkout tags/flexplorer-assignment-1-startThis will put git into 'detached HEAD' mode (it will inform you of this).
If you want to create a branch from here to save your work, git will tell you to do the following.
$ git switch -c <your-branch-name>
This way, you have a branch based on the tag you started with and you can create commits on your branch to save your work and still be able to jump through the history.
If you want to combine the two in a single action, execute the following command.
git checkout tags/flexplorer-assignment-1-start && git switch -c my-work-from-flexplorer-assignment-1-startCurrent State
| You can follow along with the descriptions below by opening the process models from the provided files with Camunda Modeler using or by pressing Ctrl+o and selecting the models with the same names. |
Maintain Fleet
Vehicles out in the field are subject to scheduled maintenance, but it also happens that a maintenance mechanic is requested on site by customers before the next maintenance comes around. Requests come in by e-mail, after which an appointment is scheduled by a special tool that knows about the mechanics' current schedules.
Swap Fleet
As Flexplorer’s customers rent out the vehicles to their own customers, they also collect feedback on the experiences of using the vehicles to explore. In some cases, this leads to requests to swap either their entire fleet or just a part of it for other vehicles or even other vehicle types. This is known as a fleet swap, where for instance quad bikes are replaced by skelters or an upgrade of a canoe fleet provides improved water stability.
The process is straightforward. Flexplorer will order the new fleet while attempting to resell the existing fleet to either existing or new customers that have indicated interest in it. Once both are completed, an automated message is sent to the customer that their request has been confirmed.
Resell Fleet
You probably noticed that reselling the fleet is a subprocess of the Swap Fleet process. It’s the next process Flexplorer wants to work on, because at the moment all of the work is done by Stian, who is actually responsible for margin setting instead and would like to make clear what it is he does in case of a resale so others can start relieving him of this extra work.
Assignments
As you come back from a delicious lunch where you got to meet Bron and Stian, the sky over the fjord has turned from blue to ominous mid-grey. You make it back to the warehouse when the first drops tap the ground. Lucy stayed behind to make some phone calls and according to office manager Henry, she was called out to a client meeting with another colleague and had to leave, but she will send you an e-mail with the first improvement ideas so you can get started.
When Henry has finally found the guest WiFi password card under a pile of tea-cup saucers and after a couple of attempts to finally get you online, the e-mail from Lucy is already waiting for you in your inbox.
Maintain Fleet
Hey,
I’m sorry, I had to rush out. We’re still good for dinner tonight! We’ve been testing some new remote-controlled boats with cameras on the calmer water of Breiddalsvatnet near Grotli and they have a GPS issue we need to fix.
Anyway, this first e-mail is about maintenance.
The automated appointment thing we have right now is not working. I mean, it works technically, but we have a lot of issues with customers who aren’t available to be around if we schedule it. So we need to send a proposal first instead. It’s easier for now if we just cut the automation and schedule by hand, send the proposal and wait for them to confirm. If not, then we’ll keep proposing options until we find a match.
We’ve now also got the mechanics equipped with tablets on the road, so the maintenance should be complete after they’ve filed their report from the tablet, so we should add that. We thought we shouldn’t burden them with tasks, so if they put in a report, there’s a trigger to the process system to check it off. Could we hook the process up to that?
Oh, almost forgot: the mechanic should call the customer 30 minutes before they arrive. It’s a work instruction thing, they all know it and we don’t really need to track it or anything, but is there a way we could put that in the model somehow to show we’re aware of that going on?
Cheers and TTYL,
Lucy van der Heijden
Founder and CEO
Flexplorer
Update the model in the maintain-fleet.bpmn file to incorporate the changes to the process.
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Swap Fleet
Another e-mail has come in from Lucy.
Me again. These are the points for fleet swapping.
The review loop is working fine, but sometimes the person tasked to order the fleet can’t get their hands on any vehicles from our stock. We can buy new ones in that case, but it requires a different authorisation to put in purchase orders, so we send it to a manager.
We don’t need to wait for the full resale to complete for this process to end. It’s more of a kickstart from this one. But we do want to start it after the new fleet is ordered. It wouldn’t be very customer-friendly to start selling their fleet as long as we haven’t secured the replacements, you know 😀 We call that "fleet freed" because that means the existing fleet is freed up to go someplace else, since the new fleet has been set up. We expect the "fleet freed" moment to be used to trigger more than just resales in the future, so maybe we can take that into account?
Also, I don’t really like the service task at the end there. It’s an external communication - can we make that clear?
Best,
Lucy van der Heijden
Founder and CEO
Flexplorer
Make the process improvements to the swap-fleet.bpmn model.
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Resell Fleet
Lucy is redirecting you to Stian for resales.
Just wrapped up here with the boats and about to come back to the warehouse. I don’t know how far you’ve gotten, but Stian should be able to tell you most before I get back.
Lucy van der Heijden
Founder and CEO
Flexplorer
You already took some notes after lunch about Stian’s plans for the Resell Fleet process. After a quick check with him and adding some small changes, you return to your desk and look at the notes to start modelling.
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Starts when fleet freed
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Parallel:
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Monitor for at least three months until we’ve resold at least 70% of the fleet
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Decide which customers to target, if none: wait a week, then retry. If some: start subprocess to offer fleet. After offer, if resold all, branch complete, else back to target
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In monitor branch, if >70% resold, stock remaining fleet (user task), schedule fleet delivery (UT)
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If > 70% resold, stop targetting - terminate end event?
Open up the model in resell-fleet.bpmn and design the process Stian has in mind.
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