Post 2

1. Define TPS & DSS, and explain how an organisation can use these systems to make decisons and gain competitive advantages

Transactional process systems (TPS) are the basic business systems that serve the operational level in an organisation, and the primary purpose for transactional information is to support the performing of daily operational tasks. Organisations use transactional information when performing operational tasks and repetitive decisions such as analysing daily sales reports to determine how much inventory to carry.
Decision support systems (DSS) model information to support managers and business professionals during the decision making process. A properly designed DSS is an interactive software-based system intended to help decision makers compile useful information from raw data, documents, personal knowledge, and/or business models to identify and solve problems and make decisions

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

1.     Sensitivity analysis- is the study of the impact that changes in one or more parts of the model have on the other parts of the model. Users change the value of one variable constantly and view the resulting changes in other variables.

2.     What-if analysis- checks the impact of a change in an assumption on the proposed solution. Users repeat this analysis until they understand all the effects of different conditions

3.     Goal-seeking analysis- finds the inputs necessary to achieve a goal such as a desired level of output. Goal seeking analysis sets a target value for a variable and then repeatedly changes other variables until the target value is achieved.

3. Describe business processes and their importance to an organisation.

A business process is a standardised set of activities that accomplish a specific task, such as processing a customer’s order. They change a set of inputs into a set of outputs. Automatic checkout systems at a supermarket are an excellent example of business process improvement. Investigating business processes help organisations to anticipate bottlenecks, eliminate duplicate activities and combine related activities.  Organisations are only as effective as their business processes.

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 in view of that. Organisations start by documenting what they currently do; then they establish a way to measure the process, follow the process, measure the performance and finally, identify improvement opportunities based on the collected information. This method for improving business processes is effective in obtaining gradual incremental improvement. New technologies such as the internet and wireless rapidly bring new capabilities to businesses, thereby raising the competitive bar and the need to improve business processes.

Business process re-engineering (BPR) is the analysis and redesign of work flow within and between enterprises. BPR relies on a different school of thought than business process improvement. BPR supposes that the current process is irrelevant, does not work, or is broken and must be repaired from scratch. Organisations frequently strive to improve their business processes by performing tasks faster and cheaper and better. Creating value for the customer is the leading factor for setting up BPR, and IT often plays a vital enabling position. A true BPR attempt does more for a company than simply improve it by performing a process better, faster and cheaper; it can redefine best practices for its whole industry.

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

After choosing to redesign the business processes, an organisation must decide the most efficient way to begin to restore the processes. They must create process models documenting a step-by-step process sequence for the activities that are necessary to convert input to outputs for the process.

Business process modelling (or mapping)is the activity of creating a detailed flowchart or process map of a work process, showing inputs, tasks and activities in a  structured sequence. A business process model is a graphic description of a process, showing the sequence of tasks which is developed for a specific purpose. The purpose of a process model is to expose process detail gradually and in a controlled manner, encourage conciseness and accuracy, focus attention on process model interfaces and provide powerful process analysis.
As-is process models represent the current state of the operation that has been mapped , without any changes to existing processes. To-be process models show the result of applying change improvement opportunities t the current as-is process model. As-is and To-be process models are integral in process re-engineering projects.