CH.7: BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT

      Since business processes are very critical, complex, and dynamic in structure, it is very essential and important for organizations to practice business process management. This is the systematic process of creating, assessing, and altering business processes. Businesses can create policies, procedures, and committees to constantly evaluate how effective their business processes are. Functional processes are activities that are within a single department. A human resource manager has the power to resolve BPM issues quickly. Cross functional processes is within multiple departments in a single company. Customer relationship management is an example involves several departments. Many restaurants use a customer survey in order to address customer concerns or problems they've had. There 1(800) customer service numbers or online chats that can resolve customer problems fairly quickly. Interorganizational processes include activities from companies that process your credit card transactions and shipping details. Functional applications are used in organizations which is a computer program that supports or automates the major activities in the processes. Not many organizations have their own functional application and rather get it from a vendor and then adapt it to their type of structure. Sales and marketing applications is essential to get a company's product out their to a specific clientele, they also manage the advertising, promotions and the messages they want to send out. Operations applications are merged into manufacturing systems. Manufacturing applications include inventory, manufacturing planning, manufacturing scheduling,and manufacturing operations. It is very important for a business to control and monitor their inventory in order to see what is needed and how they are managing all of their products. A customer relationship management is a cross functional application that tracks all interactions with customers. There are four phases of the customer life cycle: which is marketing, customer acquisition, relationship management, and loss/churn. The marketing phase sends messages to a target market to attract potential customers. Customer acquisition is actually selling the product to them. Relationship Management is supporting and reselling items to customers. Apple does a great job in selling their products to customers and have been said to have very loyal customers. ERP systems are enterprise wide which tracks customers, processes orders, manages inventory, pays employees, and provides general ledger, payable, receivables, and other accounting functions. This does about everything and is primarily used in manufacturing companies. The main ERP software is SAP and another major vendor is Oracle. This can be one of the most important system to have in a company. The benefits of ERP are: successful business processes, inventory reduction, lead-time reduction, improved customer service, greater real time insight, into organization, and higher profitability.