Notes

Describe in detail the nature of their business processes.
Business Scenario

A large Sales and Inventory company, which is predominantly operating in the Philippines is going to be offering its products and services to many international countries in its drive to grow and become a large international company. Currently, they are using both manual and computerized systems. Only for cashiering that they utilized the computerized system, while for inventory of products, purchasing of products to supplier and getting the orders from customers are still in manual. This mean that the systems it has been using to keep track of customer enquiries about information and purchase of its products and services, cashiering and conducting product inventories, will need to be centralized or a new system should be developed to reflect the changes in the way it will operate. With their current system, the company experienced flaws and delays in generating updated products inventory and sales reports. Also, as the CEO has observed, there are a lot of products in their warehouse that are seldom sold. He thought maybe that problems were due to minimal number of employees, which composed of two employees per department excluding their head.

The company started in the year 2000 selling motorcycle parts, auto parts, furniture supplies, lightings, plastic wares, electronic supplies and other hardware supplies managed by the couple Mr and Mrs Te. They named the company XYT, named after their son, Xyril Yee Te. After two years of operation, the couple able to hire their son as the CEO with personal secretary and accountant. All their hardware and electronic supplies were taken from International suppliers, Galaxy and Global hardwares. Auto and motors are coming from Japan supplier, while furniture’s are from SamYa in China and Mandawi, Philippines. The company offers a much wider range of products and services to accommodate the needs of the international market. They accept orders through emails, phone calls or walk-in from nearby customers. Since they are into international market, customers will be using a range of currencies to pay the products and the company will need to consider for the fluctuating currency exchange rates in its new system. In the Philippines, they cater around 500 customers in a day, both walk-in and regular clients, while more than thousands of customers in the global market. They charge a freight for the delivery of orders depending on the volume of order. A minimum of Php300.00 or $4 for orders below Php10,000 pesos or $20. Charges is based on the total amount.

The two employees (cashier and sales staff) in Sales department do the sales transactions. They are the one who entertains their clients and get the orders from clients who went to their store and from clients thru emails. Upon inquiry, the staff records the orders in a piece of paper and checks its availability. Once available, they record all the orders direct to their sales invoice containing the unit, particulars, quantity, price per unit and the total amount. The sales invoice will be forwarded to the warehouse for the preparation of products. Once the products are ready, the invoice will be forwarded to the cashier for billing. Before billing, the sales staff will inform the clients of the total bill. For the clients who transact thru emails, the sales staff will print the orders, ask the warehouse for its availability, then inform their clients thru email. The payments of these clients are done thru bank to bank transactions. The cashier has to wait from the Accounting Department to verify the payment made by those clients thru bank before it will be generated in the billing. The billing is a computerized system, where it able to keep the record of the customer, the amount rendered, and calculate the change. It can also generate the total sales for the day. However, it will not record the details of the products. The cashier has to keep the record of the paid invoices, write it down in their logbook according to how it was written in the sales invoice and prepare the duplicate copy for the warehouse department to update their inventory and to the logistics department for the delivery of products to send the products to their courier. The original copy of the invoice will be forwarded to the Accounting office for the preparation of the sales report. The two personnel in-charge in the warehouse department will update their inventory according to the products sold. They also have the inventory logbook where they record the products sold and products left by tallying it from the product list. If products in the inventory have a number of <=30, they will prepare a purchase order invoice and forward it to the Purchasing department for verification and approval. Once the CEO approves the purchase order, warehouse department will forward the purchase order to their suppliers. The warehouse department also is responsible for checking the products once delivered and update their inventory logbook. For damage, insufficient or inaccurate delivered products, the warehouse in-charge automatically update the delivery invoice. All damaged products will be returned to the supplier. Check payments to supplier will be prepared by Accounting department according to the received products excluding the damaged.

At the end of the day, the cashier will endorse the sales to the accounting office. The staff in the accounting department will check whether the endorsed sales amount has equated to the sales report. Every week, the accounting department will prepare for the financial report.


CEO Observation

The consolidation of online and within company sales reports takes time to be submitted to their office. The inventory reports and purchased orders, are also not updated. The CEO aims to have a clear presentation of financial reports. They are willing to invest all the essential requirements of the system to organize their processes. reports

You work as a project manager and information systems analyst of a business consultancy company which has won the contract to develop the new system of XYT, Inc. company. You work with many other analysts as part of a development team to address the need of the company. The CEO is looking forward for a timely sales transaction from their clients in various locations and an updated report both in sales and inventory, and analytics of their products as to what are salable, not salable, and products that are seasonal in nature.

You will manage the project, analyze the current scenario and design stage of the new system. Your first task is to update the in-house team on the developments in new methodologies used to analyze systems. Most of the in-house team use only the more traditional approaches and few are fully aware of the agile methodologies which are growing in popularity.

Red: Concern/Problem
Green: Historical Background
Blue: Business Process/System
Italic: Needs to consider
Bold: Eme eme important details.
Accounting department 2
Warehouse department 2
Logistics department 2
Sales department 2
Purchasing department 2
Accountant
Secretary
ceo
What is the nature of business?
The nature of a business describes the type of business it is and what its overall goals are. It describes its legal structure, industry, products or services, and everything a business does to reach its goals. It depicts the business’s problem and the main focus of the company’s offerings. A company’s vision and mission statement also provide an insight into its nature.

A mission statement provides an overview of the overall purpose of an organisation. It is a short statement that describes what the company does, who they do it for, and what its benefits are. The company vision describes what it aims to achieve in the future, to fulfil its mission. It should provide guidance and inspiration to employees.

The following aspects determine the nature of business:

Regular process – the profit-generating processes that are regularly repeated.
Economic activity – activities that maximise profit.
Utility creation – a kind of utility the goods or services create for the consumer, such as time utility, place utility, etc.
Capital requirement – the amount of funding required for the business.
Goods or Services – types of goods (tangible or intangible) offered by the business.
Risk – the risk factor related to the business.
Profit earning motive – the businesses’ profit-earning motive.
Satisfaction of consumers’ needs – based on the consumers’ satisfaction.
Buyers and sellers – the type of buyers and sellers involved in the business.
Social obligations – all businesses have corporate social responsibilities to undertake.

What is Nature?
the basic or inherent features of something, especially when seen as characteristic of it.

What is a business process?
A business process is an activity or set of activities that accomplish a specific organizational goal. Business processes should have purposeful goals, be as specific as possible and produce consistent outcomes.

Why are business processes important?

Defined business processes within the organization are critical to enterprise success for the following reasons:

They help organizations identify and understand the actual work required to keep the lights on and to achieve organizational objectives.
They break that work into organized, repeatable steps that workers can follow to achieve consistent outcomes.
Using repeatable steps to produce consistent outcomes helps organizations to more accurately predict the resources they need, thereby lowering the risk of over or under provisioning valuable resources.
The consistent, repeatable nature of defined business outcomes helps lower the risk of employees introducing workarounds or individualized steps that can cause disruptions, slow work and increase error rates.
Being able to better measure the efficiency and effectiveness of the individual steps within the process enables teams to identify and mitigate inefficiencies and bottlenecks to improve performance; this is the foundation of continuous improvement.
Teams are better able to identify where technologies -- such as robotic process automation (RPA) -- can be used to further boost effectiveness or efficiencies.