Linköping University | Department of Computer and Information Science Master’s thesis, 30 ECTS | Information Technology 2021 | LIU-IDA/LITH-EX-A--2021/045--SE Digitalizing the workplace: im- proving internal processes using digital services – A process improvement by digitalization, emphasizing chosen quality factors Digitalisering av arbetsplatsen: förbättring av interna processer med hjälp av digitala tjänster Madeleine Bäckström Nicklas Silversved Supervisor : Jonas Wallgren Examiner : Kristian Sandahl Linköpings universitet SE–581 83 Linköping +46 13 28 10 00 , www.liu.se Upphovsrätt Detta dokument hålls tillgängligt på Internet - eller dess framtida ersättare - under 25 år från publicer- ingsdatum under förutsättning att inga extraordinära omständigheter uppstår. Tillgång till dokumentet innebär tillstånd för var och en att läsa, ladda ner, skriva ut enstaka ko- pior för enskilt bruk och att använda det oförändrat för ickekommersiell forskning och för undervis- ning. 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Madeleine Bäckström © Nicklas Silversved Abstract In recent years, the number of digital services and tools available has increased rapidly. When companies want to digitalize their business, they have the opportunity to browse a large number of existing platforms and applications available on the market to find a good match for their specific needs. However, when a company wishes to digitalize a work task that already has a well-established workflow, problems may arise. Due to this, a tailored digital solution may in some cases be the better suited option, rather than the ones available on the market. The intention of this work was to investigate the challenges that companies face in relation to digitalization of the workplace in general, and the challenges of a company’s expense management process in particular. As an example of how a workplace digitaliza- tion can take place, a collaboration with a forest industry company was conducted. An evaluation of their analog and internal expense management process was done, where the found challenges were assessed with respect to chosen quality factors. The evaluation and the found challenges regarding digitalization constituted the basis for a process mapping and a digital solution aiming to improve the company’s expense management process. The resulting work emphasizes how a digital solution can be tailored with simple means within a limited time frame, taking specific needs and existing challenges into account in order to digitalize the workplace. In addition, the work presents what challenges that exists within the concept of digitalizing the workplace and regarding expense management, and how quality factors can be used in combination with a process improvement in order to relieve and eliminate them. Acknowledgments We would like to thank Richard Haag, Andreas Olofsson, and Sofia Edman at Holmen, for their valuable support and feedback throughout this project. A big thank you is also directed to everyone at Holmen who participated in interviews and user tests. In addition, we would like to thank Sogeti Linköping for the opportunity to conduct this work with their support. A special thank you is directed to Jonas Jaani who has been of great importance as our main contact and supervisor at Sogeti. We would also like to thank our examiner Kristian Sandahl, and supervisor Jonas Wall- gren at Linköping University for all their help. Lastly, we thank Mimmi Cromsjö and Linn Hallonqvist for their important feedback on our work. iv Contents Abstract iii Acknowledgments iv Contents v List of Figures vii List of Tables viii 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation . 1 1.2 Aim............................................ 2 1.3 Research questions . 2 1.4 Delimitations . 2 2 Theory 3 2.1 Defining digitalization . 3 2.2 Expense management . 4 2.3 Process evaluation and improvement . 6 2.4 Technologies . 10 2.5 Related work . 12 3 Method 14 3.1 Overview . 14 3.2 Digitalizing the workplace . 15 3.3 Digitalizing the expense management process . 15 4 Results 20 4.1 Digitalizing the workplace . 20 4.2 Digitalizing the expense management process . 25 5 Discussion 48 5.1 Results . 48 5.2 Method . 53 5.3 The work in a wider context . 54 6 Conclusion 56 6.1 Future work . 57 Bibliography 59 A Interview Questionnaire: common 63 v B Interview Questionnaire: cardholder 65 C Interview Questionnaire: attesting manager 66 D Interview Questionnaire: finance department 67 E User test template 68 vi List of Figures 2.1 Overview of the five phases of DMAIC. 7 2.2 An overview of the method PDCA for the Improve phase of DMAIC. 9 3.1 Overview of applied way of working. 14 3.2 Overview of method analysis phase. 17 4.1 Process map, card purchase. 27 4.2 Process map, invoice receival. 28 4.3 Process map, invoice handling. 29 4.4 A simplified version of the current expense report. 30 4.5 Wireframes of the initial prototype sketch. 37 4.6 Home screen, cardholder. 38 4.7 Home screen, manager. 38 4.8 Creating a new expense, part 1. 39 4.9 Creating a new expense, part 2. 40 4.10 Invoices and receipts screen. 41 4.11 Submitting expense report screen. 42 4.12 Approve expense reports overview screen. 43 4.13 Review submitted expense report screen. 43 4.14 Decline expense report screen. 44 4.15 Approve expense report screen. 44 vii List of Tables 4.1 Process map notation descriptions. 26 viii 1 Introduction This section aims to give an overview of the work as a whole, introduce the motivation and aim, and present the research questions that are to be answered with this thesis. 1.1 Motivation The constant development of new technology has over the years helped companies change their way of working, reduce their costs and improve their efficiency by making analog and time-consuming tasks digital. However, not only are there benefits with moving towards a digital workplace. In an article written by Parviainen et al. [32], both challenges and benefits regarding digitalization are discussed. The discussion is based on a literature study together with several case studies of companies that have made a digitalization journey. In order to get a broader understanding about these challenges and benefits, companies from various domains took part in the case studies. One of the benefits mentioned in the article is that converting an analog process that includes a lot of information into a digital process can re- duce costs by up to 90 %. However, they mention that digitalizing a process could also be challenging since it might cause disturbance in the company’s current way of working. In ad- dition to the previously mentioned benefits, Haddud and McAllen [22] explain that a digital workplace is said to have positive impact on an organization when considering productiv- ity and employee engagement. Having a digital workplace can also be considered beneficial when facing issues regarding work at a physical site. Due to this, one can imagine that or- ganizations can benefit from digitalizing analog tasks to reduce the need of working at a specific location. An example of this is the covid-19 pandemic [31] where the restrictions that followed forced many companies to work from home. This created a greater need for organi- zations to make it easier for their employees to work remotely. Digitalizing the workplace in order to make it more mobile for possible future challenges can therefore be beneficial. This thesis has been carried out in collaboration with Holmen, a Swedish forestry com- pany that is in the middle of an ongoing digitalization journey to achieve, as they say, Digital happiness [48]. By exploring the possibilities of using digital services, they have managed to make it easier for employees to work from home, simplified how computers are distributed and updated within the company by moving services to the cloud. In addition, they have succeeded in creating an AI model that automates the distribution of invoices for employees’ expenses through email. 1 1.2. Aim Continuing their journey to achieve digital happiness, they now wish to digitalize their ex- pense management process. Today, this process consists of manual paper handling between different departments of the company as well as the need to log in to different applications in order to complete the task.