So, welcome back to another session of Enterprise System. My name is Jason Chan, and we'll be diving more deeply into this exciting world of Enterprise Systems. So, to do a quick recap of what we've seen in our first session, we have learned about why Enterprise Systems are valuable to companies, the kinds of jobs that are tied to ERP systems. We've also talked about the concept of what business process are and it's because of this very nature of allowing companies to have a process view of the activities, Enterprise Systems are useful in that sense. So, today, let's dive more deeply into the concept of what business processes are. So, before we can actually talk about what business processes are, let's take a look at the company. So, a company exists for one main reason, which is to serve some kind of commercial purpose or a social objective. So, largely speaking, we see three main types of companies. The first type is that a company exists to create and to deliver products. An example of that would be, the Apple company. They design and they manufacture electronic products such as; laptops, phones, and tablets. What they do with their manufactured products is that they sell them to the retailers, who in turn sells them to the end users. That's the first kind of company. There are also companies that exist to provide manufacturers with parts and raw materials. An example of that would be, Foxconn. Foxconn, works very closely with Apple, and they supply them with the chassis of phones to make iPhones. At the same time, there are companies that manufacture the glass panel for your phones and also there are also companies that manufacture the processors to be used within the phone. Finally, we have the third kind of companies that provide purely services only and related to the phone industries, we have telco [inaudible] companies that are in charge of providing mobile cellular service so that as you turn on your phone, you're able to use it to make a call or to send a text. Examples of that include: AT&T, Verizon, and also T-Mobile in the US. So, regardless of what the company does in its objective, companies would have to use business process to complete the work in order to achieve certain business goals. Now, having seen this background, we can now move on to define what business processes are. So, business processes are nothing more than a set of tasks or activities that a company undertakes to produce certain desired outcomes. Business processes are always triggered by some sort of event. For instance, when a company receives a customer order, that will kick start the fulfillment business process. When a warehouse realize that there's a drop in inventory and there's a need to stock up, that is also a trigger for them to start some further business process. For instance, to buy more materials or to make more materials because business processes are very long and they usually involve many different people from different business areas. We will see that the steps in a business process are likely to be completed by different functional areas. Business processes are very widespread. We get to see them from a variety of different tasks. For instance, ordering, buying parts from a manufacturer, counting and keeping track of inventory in a warehouse, producing goods in a factory, hiring and laying off labor and also compensating them, and also making an accounting entry or reporting of tax within a company, or instances of different steps within different business processes.
