Thursday, April 7, 2011

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.

Ch.6 DATA COMMUNICATION

       This chapter basically covers how and what is used to communicate online and through different types of networks. A network is the collection o computers that communicate with one another through transmission lines or wireless. An example of LAN would be like the computer lab at the business lab. All the computers are connected to a single location that students can access onto a single LAN since it is in the same geographic location. The WAN or wide area networks would be used for big corporations that are located in different geographic locations. Other types of internet connections would be a DSL modem which translates to a digital subscriber line. They operate on the same lines as voice telephones. I used to have DSL AOL and it seemed that it would take longer to connect to the internet. The better alternative would be to have a cable modem connected to a wireless router. They provide high speed data transmission using cable television lines. This is one of the most popular choices amongst households. Ex: Comcast installs a fast, high capacity optical fiber cable to a distribution center in each neighborhood that it serves. This is the more popular choice because when a household connects the cable into the wireless modem to a router, every person living in the household can connect to the internet with a relatively high speed. VPN is a virtual private network that creates an appearance of a private connection. A tunnel is the virtual private pathway over a public or shared network from the VPN client, VPN communications are secure because the client software encrypt, or codes so that the contents are protected from spammers. There are pubic or private keys on the internet. There are the public keys which encodes messages and private keys that decode them. Secure communication over the internet uses a protocol called HTTPS where data is encrypted using a protocol called the Secure Socket Layer. It is also beneficial to create firewalls on your computer to prevent unauthorized network access. A perimeter firewall is outside the organizational network and internal firewalls are inside an organizational network.