Description Of The Problem Solving Process

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Contents

Introduction

This is a medium sized business company providing the health services to the hospitals and doctors of UK. A large number of customer support staff are working in this company. But recently, the old telephone system of the company has stopped working and the customer support is done mostly using e-mail. The company is in need of an enterprise telephone system in the four working sites of the business company. For the same purpose, a small research is done in order to select the most suitable enterprise telephone system from a range of available suppliers in the United Kingdom. The allocated budget of £25000(Pounds Sterling) is to be wisely utilized or invested in order to install the new telephone system with desired additional features which possibly can meet the business needs of the business company. The detailed study and selection of the best enterprise telephone system for the company is illustrated below:

Plan

According to the present context of our company, the first step will be the replacement of the old telephone system with the completely new telephone system which can cope with the current business needs of our business company. A suitable as well as budget-friendly telephone system will be first selected from the range of suppliers in the market of UK those possibly meet the success criterions. As there are four sites of our business, the telephone systems need to be installed to all the four sites and as there are 20 users in each site, there should be needed around 8-80 telephones as per the type of the telephone system we are going to install. The allocated budget of £25000(Pounds Sterling) will be kept in mind while buying the telephone systems. It is not necessary to install the telephones for each of the staff individually because each staff will not be doing the work of receiving the call at the same time. After sufficient numbers of telephones are installed, the suitable VoIP service should be subscribed which will be affordable to our company. After the VoIP subscription, the user staffs of each site will be given operation training for the operation of the newly installed business telephone system. The training will be conducted by the investment of the remaining budget after the installment of the telephone system.

The figurative summary of the plan is below:

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Description of the problem solving process

Problem definition

Currently, the company is facing the problem with the telephone system. The old telephone system has stopped working and the company has desired to replace it with the new enterprise telephone system. It has become much difficult for the staff to provide the customer service through e-mail and in case of effectiveness too, it is not worth mentioning. The reputation of the company is day by day going down due to which it may have an intense effect to the business in the coming days and may impart the negative impressions to the customers. In order to maintain the reputation and the pace of the day-to-day business, the telephone system should be installed as soon as possible and for this the main problem that arises is the selection of the suitable enterprise telephone system from a range of many suppliers available in the UK markets. There are a much number of suppliers in the UK but its difficult choosing which one is the best that meets the present needs of the company. To overcome this problem, the company should soon replace the old telephone system with the new enterprise telephone system with new technologies and stand again in the business environment to meet greater business achievements.

b. Identifying selection criteria

Selection criterions or success criterions are the things we buyers should take into consideration while buying certain goods. These may be the costs, reliability, user friendliness, security, etc. Likewise, while selecting the most suitable enterprise telephone system from the number of manufacturers available in the UK market, we need to consider certain success criterions that will help us find the most suitable product we are in search of. While identifying the success criterions, we should consider such criterions that will possibly help us find the best option for meeting our need instead of choosing in random. The success criterions we will consider are- scalability, value added features, cost, performance and user friendliness. We can be pretty sure that the success criterions we have considered will help us find the most suitable solution from the group of solutions.

Scalability: - Scalability simply means flexibility. Scalability is considered as one of the success criterions because until and unless the telephone system is scalable, it will not be able to cope up with the needs of the company in the near future.

Value Added features: - Investment on the hardware time to time is pretty inapplicable and much costly. That’s why; some value added features such VoIP, video conferencing, recording of employee performance data and so on.

Cost:-The product type we are going to buy greatly depends on the amount we have allocated for it. The product we are buying should be within the budget we have allocated. So, it is also one of the selection criterions.

Performance:- The business achievements cannot be gained if we buy the telephone systems whose performance is low-level. So performance should be considered as one of the success criterions.

User friendliness:- It will be much easier for the users to be familiar with the newly installed telephone system if the system is easy to use or user friendly. So, it is taken as one of the success criterions.

c.Process of selection (evaluation of solutions)

During the selection process of the suitable solution, we considered the success criterions or the selection criterions by giving each of them a suitable score in between the range of 1 to 5. 1 is for the best, 2 for very good, 3 for good, 4 for acceptable and 5 for not bad. At last, the solution with the lowest number of points will be considered as our best solution. While doing the selection, we should not focus or stick much into only one of the success criterions. We should consider each selection criteria equally keeping in mind our objective. Here, we are finding out the best solution by considering the results given by all the selection criterions. The following table illustrates more about this:-

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d.Statements and details of solution

In the above solutions, Digium is not much scalable and does not provide much value added features which cannot properly meet the requirement of our business company though it is user friendly and budget friendly. Panasonic is scalable, has some value added features, budget friendly, and is also much user friendly and it has scored first and it is the best solution we were in search of. It can meet the requirements of the present as well as future requirements of our business company. Samsung and Cisco are not much scalable, not so user friendly and are expensive too. Lastly, Avaya is also expensive, and performance is not much good though it is so much user-friendly. In this way, the allocated budget of £25000 can be utilized properly for the proper enterprise telephone system required as per the need of the company. Thus, Panasonic is the best enterprise telephone system in the range of the budget allocated and as per company’s requirement. The total approximate cost for the Panasonic telephone system will be not much than £11,640(pounds sterling) and the remaining amount will be invested in training the staff and installation of the additional features such as VoIP, call recording, automatic answer in case of the unavailability of the staff and so on.

Conclusion

In this way, the problem of the company is solved using the above problem solving technique. Now, the expected enterprise telephone system i.e., the Panasonic telephone system. Now, the company’s business will now go on with a greater pace than previous days as it will become much convenient for the staffs to provide the customer service at the time of the customers’ demands. Along with it, the multiple customer queries can be answered at the same time due to which the customers will become satisfied to the fullest and the reputation of the company will reach to the peak one day. As the installed system is scalable, there is not any doubt that there will be insufficient phones for the staff if in the future days; the number of staffs is altered to the maximum.