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Monday, 15 August 2011

Week 3 Questions- Strategic Decision Making

1. Define TPS & DSS, provide some exapmples of these systems in business


Transaction Processing Systems (TPS) manage business activities, this including sales receipts and payroll and used for the operation of businesses. They provide the foundation for other business systems, usually those who convey impressions about the quality of the business to the customers.


Decision Support Sytems (DSS) assist decision making to complex problems. It portrays information to help support managers when they are making decisions.


2. Describe the three quantitative models typically used by decision support systems.


Quantitative models sometimes used by DSS include:


Sensitivity analysis: study of the impact that changes in one (or more) parts of the model have on other parts of the model. The user can change value of one variable as many times as they want and look at the changes in the other variables.


What-if analysis: checks the impact of a change in an assumption on the proposed solution.


Goal-seeking analysis: finds the inputs necessary to achieve a goal such as a desired level of output. Instead of observing how changes in variables affect others this analysis sets a goal for a variable and changes the other variables until the goal is achieved.
3. Describe a business processes and their importance to an organisation, outline and example of how they are used.


Business process:
- a standardised set of activities that accomplish a specific task.
- it transforms a set of inputs into a set of outputs (e.g. customer checkout services) a business can satisfy


The best way a business can satisfy customers and spur profits is by understanding all of its business processes.


E.G.
A supermarket uses checkouts, which is the "process", and the purpose of it is to pay for and pack groceries. The process starts when the customer is in line, and ends when the customer receives the receipt.


SAMPLE BUSINESS PROCESSES.


Accounting/ Finance Business Processes
- Accounts payable
- Accounts receivable


Environmental Business Processes
- Environmental protection
- Hazardous waste management
4. Compare business process improvement and business process re-engineering.


Business process improvement: attempts to understand and measure the current process and make performance improvements accordingly.






Business process re-engineering: analyses and redesigns workflow within and between enterprises.


5. Describe the importance of business process modelling (or mapping) and business process models.


Business process modelling (or mapping) is the activity of creating a detailed flowchart ot process map of a work process. Within it showing its inputs, tasks and activities in a structured sequence.


A business process model is a graphic description of a process showing the sequence of process tasks which is developed for a specific purpose and from a selected viewpoint. This model usually displays activities as boxes and uses arrows to represent data and interfaces.


The purpose of a process model is to:
- expose process detail gradually and in a controlled manner.
- encourage consiceness and accuracy in describing the process model.
- focus attention on the process model interfaces.
- provide a powerful process analysis and consistent design vocabulary.


Example:


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