Distinguish between a business function and a business process. Describe how a business process cuts across functional lines in an organization.
A business function is all the interrelated activities conducted in one single functional structure, such as all activates that conducted in Human Resources department.
While business process is a group or a set of responsibilities and tasks to do that produce the anticipated outcomes, and each process triggered by some events, a good example for that is increasing the production based on statistic forecast, which is the trigger in our example.
When we point to the phrase that tells “the business process cuts across multiple functional areas in the organization”, we mean that no single functional area is responsible for their own accomplishment; instead, they work without neglecting the other functional areas, sharing the responsibility among them to achieve the outcomes of the entire organization.
Question Two
1 Mark
Learning Outcome(s):
Describe key issues related to enterprise systems and system integration
Recent enterprise systems combine a collection of major processes and closely related to buying, making, and selling processes. State and describe them briefly?
The three key business processes that involved in any manufacturer process are the following:
1. Procurement process: “that is closely related to buying” and it is include every action made to purchase materials needed in manufacturing a definite product, typically triggered by an order from a customer and create a requisition in the warehouse department. Followed by “creating” and “sending” the purchase order in the purchasing department, and after the warehouse receive the materials the company accounting department receive invoice then they send payment.
2. Production process: “that is closely related to making” it include all the operations, action and procedures that made to produce or make a service or product. Started by requesting for a product in the warehouse, followed by a validation in production then the warehouse issues raw material needed to create a product. The finished goods goes to the warehouse at the end of the process.
3. The fulfillment process: “that is closely related to selling” any motions, moves and actions that help the manufacturer selling the finished product. The sales department receive the customer purchase order then create the sale order. Then the warehouse prepare and send the shipment. Finally, the accounting department create and send invoice then receive the payment.
Question Three
1 Mark
Learning Outcome(s):
Describe key issues related to enterprise systems and system integration.
Select appropriate software and vendors
What makes ERP systems useful for enterprises? Show that through a real example of ERP systems.
ERP software systems primarily introduced to managed only intra-company processes, and then lately their capabilities extended and stretched to integrate external or inter-company processes, such as it works among supply chain management “SCM” and customer relationship management “CRM” by providing several options for extracting and analyzing the different types of data for different purposes. Meaning that these systems could manage and support end-to-end processes for companies that operated in several different countries, with different languages and currencies.
A very well known example for ERP systems is SAP that is an acronym for “Systems, Applications and Products”, produced by a German software firm, It aim businesses to:
1- Increase productivity because there is no need for redundant data entry within different software programs and fewer communication struggles between isolated but interdependent aspects of a company.
2- Reduce efforts and cost saving of the firm funds through using one software program to track all of the firm’s data and generate reports.
3- Enable firm to have consistent operations by allowing businesses of all sizes to align their strategies.
Question Four
1 Mark
Learning Outcome(s):
Identify principal enterprise systems architectures and implementation strategies
Show how organizational data, master data and transaction data are correlated.
In order to know how these data are correlated, we would take a quick glance about each of them:
· Organizational data signify the structure and basics of an enterprise such as plant, company code, and storage location.
· Master data denote the several units “entities”or materials that linked within processes.
· Transaction data are the ones gathered during the execution and performance of a process, it comprise information such as dates, quantities, prices, and payment and delivery terms.
These data correlated in the ERP system and used to represent the physical system in which process steps such as creating a procurement order and receiving merchandises. These steps generate data that they signify the outcomes of the steps, and these data are essential inputs and outputs in the core component of any ERP system, which is the database system that plays a key role to facilitate the process integration.
