Computer Science Homework Help

Read the assignment carefully before you form your solution. This is an exercise that requires that you think and write concisely. You will need to research this assignment on the internet, your research will be required for multiple assignments. Proofread the writing for any errors before the submission. Your grade will reflect both the quality of your research, as well as your writing.

Assume your uncle runs a small family business, with between 20  to 30 employees. You help him package the products, and sell them on the internet.

You need to document the core processes of your business, Marketing, Selling, Producing, and Supply Chain. You will do this at a high level for the whole business, and then at a more detailed level for just the parts of the business that you are in charge of, Internet marketing, selling, packaging and shipping specifically for just the internet side of the business.

Remember that a process description should be one sentence, and it must include the subject, the verb (in the present tense), and the object. An example might be, The shipping analyst identifies the lowest cost approach to ship products to the customer. Use a similar format to fig 1-1 from Monk and Wagner as a table in your Word document, but be careful of the way the book words business processes, it is very sloppy! For example, Transportation and Logistics is two nouns, so we know the area responsible, but we don’t know what they do, and we don’t know what they do it to, or for whom they do it.  Planning and Budgeting are in fact two gerunds, which are verbs that are acting as nouns, so again we are clueless in just the same way as the first example.

You should have two tables, one for the high level business processes (similar to what is shown in the example), and a second similar table for the lower level business processes for your own area of control. 

In the example in the book, there are Four Functional Areas of Operation. You should choose four or five that make sense for how your business is structured, but they should NOT include Finance or HR as you are only documenting core processes. You should plan on having  5 our 6 rows in the first table, and probably about 10 – 12 in the second table; not all columns will have every row filled out, but across both tables I would expect to see you document 50 processes. The columns may be different in the second table, you may not be responsible for anything in one of the columns in the first table, lets say it is manufacturing, but in the second table you may choose to break Supply Chain Management  into Material Management and Transportation Management.

A few words about verbs, avoid weak verbs like manage, analyze, review etc.. If you say The shipping analyst manages transportation, you really don’t know what they do, so try to find more expressive words that convey the business sense of what is being done.

And finally for the fun part, what is your uncle’s business that you are going to research. You can choose from a Furniture Manufacturer or a Packaged Foods business, there is plenty of material available on the internet to explain how these businesses function. Take a look at your table before you hand it in, do the processes sound generic, and could they apply to any business , or are they specific and really tell you how a furniture or packaged foods company works? I would expect to see references to; machining and assembly, painting/staining, upholstering, inventory etc.: similarly with packaged foods; canning, freezing, sanitation, recipe management, etc.. And remember, you are not covering Finance or HR processes.