Chapter 2 – Strategic Decision Making

Q1. Define TPS & DSS, and explain how an organisation can use these systems to make decisions and gain competitive advantages

-Transaction Processing Systems (TPS) serves at the operational level within a business and are not specific to a single function. Common examples include pay rolls, sales receipts and credit decisions. TPS is part of the Analysts in the organisational levels.

Both Batch Processing and Online Processing enable TPS to communicate to their customers the quality of the business. In society today, TPS have integrated the internet enabling internet transaction processing to occur.

-Decision Support Systems (DSS) aids to supporting managers and their issues of resolving complex problems in both unstructured and semi structured natures.

Q2. Describe the three quantitative models typically used by decision support systems.

-Sensitivity Analysis studies the impact of change in variables that one model has on another model.

- What-if Analysis checks the impact of a change in an assumption on the solution being put forth
-Goal-seeking Analysis finds the inputs needed to achieve a specific organisational goal

 

Q3. Describe business processes and their importance to an organisation.

 

Firstly, a business process is a standard set of activities that accomplish a specific task within the business. Business processes transform specific sets of inputs to outputs through processes, people and tools. Organisations are only as effective as their business processes hence why it needs to be productive and efficient to ensure the business is profitable.

Q4. Compare business process improvement and business process re-engineering.

-Business Process Improvement is a model which tries to make performance improvements by measuring as well as understanding current processes within a business. Process is continuous.

-Business Process Re Engineering for this model to be used, the current process must not work, is irrelevant and/ or is broken. It is an analysis and therefore redesign of workflow according to failed business practices.

 

Q5. Describe the importance of business process modelling (or mapping) and business process models.

-Business Process Modelling is the activity of creating a detailed flowchart or process map of a work process in a structured sequence showing inputs, tasks and activities.

-Business Process Models a graphic description of a process showing the sequence of process tasks, which is developed for a specific purpose from a selected viewpoint.

The importance of both is as follows:

• Expose process details in a gradual manner
• Encourage conciseness and accuracy
• Focus attention on the process model interfaces