Cis_205_Business_Process_and_Information_Systems

Business Process and Information Systems CIS 205 July 31, 2011 University of Phoenix Business Process and Information Systems Within the following paper the requirement is to discuss the business process within the place of employment familiar to me, along with the strengths and weaknesses of the information systems chosen and how to improve those systems. Information systems (IS) and the business process go hand-in-hand in the place that I am employed. Each area whether it be the business process end or the information system end needs one another to reach the goal of serving the customer and send required information to the corporate office. To achieve a better understanding of what business processes are and how IS is essential to supporting and managing the business process the topic will be discussed as to how they involve the job duties in my work environment. Starting with the understanding of what is a business process, this is a collection or areas that are involved in the business environment concerning; related areas, structured, or task (Rainer & Cegielski, 2011). This collection achieves the ability to serve a customer or many customers with a specific service or product. There are three types of business process within an industry these are as follows: 1. Management- this controls the operations of a system 2. Operational- Purchasing, Manufacturing, Advertisement, and Sales 3. Supporting – Accounting, Recruitment, Technical Support. Management Process Within the management process in regards to my company Information Systems is found to be an extreme importance to the company. With the corporate office located hundreds of miles from our location the need for E-mail, recording of daily sales, and relating issues within our facility is accomplished through the use of the Internet. Another advantage of IS consist of the POS being able to send required information via the network this information consist of cash sells, credit sells, amount of fuel sold, along with all entries that went into the POS register to show the users daily activities. Moving up to a current system has been an exciting experience because we was conducting our sells on a cash register that was invented in the middle 80s. Even with these advantages there are a few disadvantages to how our systems work in the area of managerial. The POS register has many capabilities to the system, but our company has decided to only set the system up to perform 30% of its capabilities. with this there are many issues that sneak up on the employees and managerial staff, which will be covered in the operational process. Operational Process The operational process relies on the IS to allow items to be ordered for the store, employee information to be given to the corporate office on hours worked, time missed, and any warnings given is in the dinosaur times (Rainer & Cegielski, 2011). The system performs its task and is done faster than when we was on dial-up Internet connection as early as three months ago. The issue with the way information is relayed to the corporate office is through a system that is from 1995, we still operate on the OS of Windows 95. With this there are many features that are not currently available for use to perform task. A strong belief is that business would become more efficient if we had the software program of Microsoft Office® to help keep track of our employees times, ordering, and employee HR issues because they programmed our POS register to only work with 30% capacity. All information must be performed by human input, whereas if our POS cash register worked to its full capacity the system would keep track of employee’s hours, and be able to track items sold to help save money with the ordering process by decreasing human ordering error. Supporting Process The area of supporting process is one I am not familiar with, these occur within the corporate office. We as managers must figure employees hours on a calculator for each day and enter the information onto a spreadsheet on the out-dated computer. I see potential for error during this process, with human miscalculation of employee’s hours. This could be avoided with the use of an up-to-date program such as Excel, or Quicken. After we figure the hours we must e-mail the finished information to the payroll department in the accounting area. Another familiar area is technical support; the only technical support that is available to us is that of the POS system, we do have a toll free number that we call to help with any technical issues. Oftentimes we call another store first to check if they have had an issue like the one we are experiencing. I have called technical support at one time to discover technical support could not help me. The reason for the inability to help is because when corporate ordered and had the system installed they failed to set the system program up to where the system could be taken over by technical support through the Internet to examine and fix issues this left them unable to help. Even though our company has updated in some areas these updates were done to the bare minimum. This not only makes the jobs of the management and employees harder but cost the company money in the end. If the POS system was fully functional they could save money from expired products, wages spent on extra paperwork, along with less human error from ringing products up incorrectly. Besides having the POS programmed to run to full capacity the company also needs to update the OS of the manager’s computer as well to add needed benefits for those who must run the fueling station. Reference Rainer, E., & Cegielski, C. G. (2011). Introduction to information systems: Supporting and transforming business (3rd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.