Chapter Two Questions

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

• TPS (Transaction Process Systems): Record every transaction of the business, and can be managed in various ways including batch and online systems. They give businesses a competitive advantage as they have a fairly fast response time, convey impressions to customers about the quality of the business and work in real time.
• DDS (Decisional Support System): assist managers in the decision making process especially when it comes to unstructured or semi-unstructured decisions.
  

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

1. Sensitivity analysis: The assessment of the impacts that a change in a part of the model has on the other parts of the model.

2. What if analysis: inspects the impacts a change in assumption has on the solution.

3. Goal seeking analysis: concerned with finding the inputs which are needed in order to achieve the goals set by the business.

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

A business process is the set of standardised tasks which are followed in order to complete specific tasks/goal/output. A business must continually assess and improve their business processes as they vital to the organisation, as a business is only as good as its processes.

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

Business Process Improvement: Is a model used by a business in order to improve their current processing systems. The business must first understand and measure the process, which is currently in use, and then make adjustments, to improve their systems.

Sourced From: http://www.outbrain.jp/en/service.html

Business Process Reengineering: This is a model which views the current process system as broken or inappropriate and then redesigns the process starting from the beginning.

Sourced From: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_reengineering

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

BPM’s are in depth flow charts that aim too:

• Process details
• Accurately describe the process model
• Focus on the model’s interfaces
• Analyse the business process