Seminar 2 (Business Processes, Business Process Modelling)
We learnt about the overview of the business process in an organization. Having been someone who have absolutely zero prior experience in any form of business, here are some of my main takeaways, from a total beginner's point of view:
1. Business organizations, if GBI is of any indication of the standard business processes (and of which we learnt that there are no actual 'standard practises') have the very few essential functional groups: marketing, IT, finance, human resource (HR), R&D and operations.
When it comes down to the very specific functions of an organization, sometimes the job scopes overlap and it makes sense to categorise it under either two or even three functional groups. It depends on the nature of the business or the preference of the managerial group.
For example, marketing usually takes care of both marketing and sales. On a side note, the difference between sales and presales is that presales is usually the department who are the experts on the product the company is selling. This is especially important for companies selling software. Companies would usually group service and support under the marketing department too, as with reference to the context of our IT course, it makes better marketing/sales sense for software to come with support as one package. This encourages customer loyalty, alongside partner enablement programs that some companies choose to adopt. Typically for companies like SAP, they can build an ecosystem around their product, making customers, suppliers and subcontracting firms alike stakeholders in their product and further adding value to all the stakeholders involved.
As another example, Operations has a huge undertaking. It is typically in charge of material planning. While closely related to manufacturing, sourcing for materials is procurement's job. Procurement may also be responsible for new offices and warehouses etc, and it is possible for procurement to be more administrative. However in the case of GBI, I would think that as a company which manufactures bicycles, admin matters are minimal and would belong to the operations side. Distribution department is in charge of managing the network of distribution: which includes shipping, warehouse locations, capabilities of warehouses and transportation. Planning warehouse is also not an easy feat: one would need to decide on which is the best location to store the finished goods so as to minimize transport cost (closely linked to distribution), storing raw materials (in the case of GBI, it makes sense that manufacturing and warehouse are in same compound).
For future references, with relation to the GBI document, the expansion of the functional groups as discussed in the class is as below:
VP Marketing: sales (Heidelberg & Dallas) , marketing (Heidelber & Dallas)
Chief Info Officer: IT (Dallas)
Chief Financial Officer: finance (Dallas)
VP HR: HR Groups (Dallas and Heidelberg)
VP research & development: Research and design (Heidelberg)
VP Operations: procurement (Heidelberg and Dallas), manufacturing (Dallas and Heidelberg), warehousing/shipping (Heidelberg, Hamburg, Dallas, San Diego, Miami), material planning (Dallas)
2. Strategies are obviously very important. The strategy adopted is relevant to all parts of an organization so a lot of knowledge is crucial for successful strategy planning, but CEOs need to decide on a direction the company needs to take (vision, mission etc).
Some of the strategies adopted by the various functional groups are discussed below:
HR: restructuring (taking concepts learnt from Organizational Behaviour), perhaps coming up with a pipeline for employee promotion
Finance: how to find new funds, budgeting (note that it has been discussed too that budgeting may involve the various departments as well)
In short, the main point is that I've learnt to appreciate and understand the different parts of the enterprise and how they come together to, in Jame's words, "give the customer the sandwich he wants."
In the student-led lesson, we discover even more in-depth details about the business processes. Essentially, I learnt that:
Business silo is inefficent
Business process is different from business function
The importance of smoothening an organization's business process is to provide an overview of the business functions and to eliminate redundancy
How to create Business Process Models
Pools (departments)
Swimlane (different actors)
Boxes (processes)
Diamonds (decisions)
Terminators (start and end, may or may not have one end and where the End is is not exceptionally important)
Page Connectors
BPM makes it much easier to notice redundancies
Redundancy/inefficiency is not implemented by the various departments on purpose, sometimes they do not even realise it themselves. Thus we need the BPM to allow a bigger, more comprehensive view.
This is the first seminar and it has been extremely informative so far, especially for an inexperienced student who just started dabbling in the world of business. The lack of final examinations made learning even more conducive, in my opinion, as it allows me to learn "indiscriminately" without having to take extra note of what will or will not come out in the exams. I am looking forward to the next few lessons!