20/03/11
Define TPS & DSS, and explain how an organisation can use these systems to make decisions and gain competitive advantages.
TPS: Transaction Processing Systems
These systems involve elementary business activities, such as sales, receipts, cash deposits, payroll, credit decisions and flow of materials. They aren’t specific to a single functional area and are transaction area. They are fundamental to the operation of a business.DSS: Decision Support System
This system assists decision making to more complex problems.An organisation can use these systems to make decisions and gain competitive advantage by:
· A TPS can help a business look over its transaction records and analyse the finances that flow in and out of the business. This can help make financial decisions for the company, like pay cuts or rises, investing in new equipment or technology, buying more assets, or any other money-related decisions.
· A TPS can help a business gain a competitive advantage by putting the moneys of the business towards new research and development and marketing research to find what sort of product/service would give the business an advantage over its competitors. Furthermore, the company’s financial assets could then be used to finance the new competitive product/service.
· A DSS can be used to make decisions for a company because that’s what the system is designed to do – it helps solve complex decisions.
· A DSS can help a company gain a competitive advantage by using the system to make decisions that other company’s haven’t and using those answers to create a competitive advantage.
Describe the three quantitative models typically used by decision support systems.
The three quantitative models typically used by DSS’ are:
1. The Sensitivity Analysis
The study of the impact that changes in one (or more) parts of the model have on other parts of the model.
The study of the impact that changes in one (or more) parts of the model have on other parts of the model.
2. The What-If Analysis
Checks the impact of a change in an assumption on the proposed solution.
Checks the impact of a change in an assumption on the proposed solution.
3. The Goal-Seeking Analysis
Finds the inputs necessary to achieve a goal.
Finds the inputs necessary to achieve a goal.
These are all found in Excel.
Describe a business processes and their importance to an organisation.
What is a business process?
· Business processes refer to the manner in which work is organised, coordinated and focussed to produce a valuable product or service.
· It is a set of activities that accomplish a specific task, - processing a customer order or enrolling a student.
· Organisations are only as effective as their business processes, these must be studied, understood and improved.
Customer-facing processes: results in a product/service that is received by an organisation’s external customer.
Business-facing processes: invisible to the external customer but essential to the effective management of the business. These include goal setting, day-to-day planning, performance feedback, rewards, and resource allocation.
Business processes are important to a business because a business is only as effective as its business processes. Therefore the strength of these processes must be very strong.
Compare business process improvement and business process re-engineering.
Business process re-engineering assumes that the process is broken and then tries to improve the experience for the company and then sometimes even sets new standards for the industry.
Comparison:
· BPI is brought in when the current business processes need to be improved, where business process re-engineering is brought in when the current business processes are broken and need to fixed and/or completely overhauled.
· BPI works as a current process performance measure and works towards improving that, whereas business process re-engineering fixes the processes and has the possibility of setting new standards for the entire industry.
Describe the importance of business process modelling (or mapping) and business process models.
Business Process Modelling
· Maps out each process
· Visualises an organisation’s operation; often at the beginning of identifying problems or new opportunities
· It is a detailed flowchart of a work processes, it aims to:
o Show process details in a gradual and controlled manner
o Encourage consciousness and accuracy in describing the process model
o Focus attention on the process mofel interfaces
o Provide a powerful process analysis and consistent design vocabulary
Business Process Models
· As-is model: the current state of the processes
· To-be models – the results of improvements to the As-is model
Their Importance
· The importance of BPM and business process models are:
o To see the entire operation of an organisation,
o To map out the process of the organisation; and
o To show how an organisation can be improved
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