
Credit Unit 4 places business process management in a larger context of management theory. Looking back a century, two contrasting themes emerge. The more traditional view sees labor as merely an input to mechanistic process. By contrast, the organic approach focuses on human activity as embedded in socially defined productive processes
Course Outcomes:
- Conceptualize business operations as processes.
- Model simple business processes in terms of the actors and activity sequences involved, the data flowing through those sequences and the dependencies between data and business activities.
- Recognize probabilistic components of business processes and assign distributions to these components.
- Characterize business processes in terms of their key operations characteristics; e.g.,productivity, efficiency, service quality, sustainability, time and costs associated with waiting, material volume and service/product customization.
- Formulate improvements to observed processes and estimate the effects of these improvements with the help of simulation.
- Identify the role of information systems in business processes; e.g., recognize and specify where information technology can be applied; recognize the role of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.
- Recognize the interdependence of business processes within and across organizational boundaries.