Ch. 8 Flashcards
What is a business process?
-A process that is focused on achieving a goal for a business.
What is a process?
- A series of tasks that are completed in order to accomplish a goal
- Something that businesses go through every day in order to accomplish their mission. —The better their processes, the more effective the business
What is a document management system?
Stores and tracks documents and supports the following functions:
- Versions and timestamps
- Approvals and workflows
- Communication
-A document management system will notify the appropriate people when a change to a document is approved
What is the simplest way to document a process?
To simply create a list
What is an Enterprise Resource Planning System (ERP)?
- A software application with a centralized database that can be used to run an entire company.
- All the data in an ERP system is stored in a single, central database
- Data entered in one part of the company can be immediately available to other parts of the company.
- An ERP can be used to manage an entire organization’s operations.
What are some of the best known ERP vendors?
- SAP
- Microsoft
- ORACLE (People Soft)
- INFOR (mid-size and small organizations)
ERP vendors combine subset of ERP modules to offer applications with high impact on the organizations.
What are the most important ones?
- Customer relationship management systems (CRM)
- Supply chain management systems (SCM)
What is customer relationship management (CRM)?
CRM systems allow managing a company’s interaction with current and future customers
What are some advantage of customer relationship management (CRM)?
- Allows tracking goals and metrics for sales, marketing, and customer services.
- Increases customer retention
- Increases profitability
- Facilitates to identify “who are your customers”
- Permits to know “what is important to your customers”
- Allows opportunity management
What is supply chain management?
- The flow of goods and services. It includes the movement and storage of raw materials, work-in-process inventory, and finished goods from point of origin to point of consumption.
- Design, planning, execution, control, and monitoring of supply chain activities with the objective of creating net value, building a competitive infrastructure, leveraging worldwide logistics, synchronizing supply with demand and measuring performance globally.
What are some advantages of supply chain system (SCM)?
- Secure accurate SCM metrics
- Help controlling bullwhip effect
- Facilitate visualization of SCM metrics
- Improve productivity
- Increase profitability
- Help to integrate value systems
What are the three alternatives to business process management?
- Automatize
- Streamlining
- Business process reengineering
What is business process management (BPM)?
Can be thought of as an intentional effort to plan, document, implement, and distribute an organization’s business processes with the support of information technology
What is automation?
- While automation can make a business more efficient, it cannot be used to provide a competitive advantage.
- Simply automating a bad process does not make it better.
What is streamlining?
- Streamlining has a better impact on efficiency and productivity, but it cannot warranty a competitive or sustainable advantage.
- It is a good strategy for process that are essential to the company but they cannot bring competitive advantage.
