Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Section 02 - Why?


Deep into the title


This report is an analysis about the applications of IT practices inside businesses. We have taken an approach to the topic through previous chapters. Now let’s go deeper into the title of this report
As we know, there are mainly 4 identified parallel processes inside a business. In practice, we identify them as “Departments”.  This is the standard departments’ structure of an average company
1.     Production Department
2.     Marketing Department
3.     Human Resources Department
4.     Finance Department
Note – The names/departments may be varied according to the type / scale / management /etc.  Of the business.

Production Department


Production Department of an organization is like the heart of the whole company body. This is the place, which directs the company to the success or to the failure through the department’s ability to satisfy consumers. In early decades, when the IT less influenced into this departments, production processes were a kind of unsmooth. It was not because anything, people didn’t have any proper way to combine and communicate all the sub processes inside a department with each other. These were the main difficulties faced by Production Departments before influencing IT into their process
Difficulties in designing the product
Designers faced many problems during the designing part of their products. Specially when creating proto types and examples, they were stressed with the R&D budgets. In this scenario, niche production was much more complicated in some industries, such as in jewelry, readymade garments, house planning, ornament designing etc. where they couldn’t pre-produce a successful prototype or a model to the customer. Due to these reasons, the production cost also went high

High cost in labor
In previous decades without Information Technology, labor requirement for a production purpose was high due to non-industrial environment. So again, the cost rose up. And not only that, for some products/ services in some industries, the resource persons who had specialized skill on their job were very low. Therefore, it was a limitation for those industries to be boomed up. The knowledge and some skills were untrasferrable from a person to another person. Moreover, due to the lack of information transferability, some training programs consumed a major part of the company budget
When we talk about labor, there was another issue, which caused cost increasing. That is human faults, It was an unavoidable issue caused in industries which mostly use human labor. And authorities tried to control this using supervision methods, but ultimately again it affected to the cost.  
Received fewer feedbacks from customers
Due to the inflexibility and unavailability of information and communication sources, there was a very poor connectivity between customer and the producer. So the production departments faced a huge problem in adjusting their products according to customer needs. Sometimes they got to know about customer dislikes on their products when their markets fell significantly. Market researches were the only way of understanding the customer, but it is a high cost method that has its own disadvantages.

Marketing Department


This is the department where the Information Technology should be a basic requirement. But during the early decades before I.T. age, Marketing department concept was not very popular. However, the process of it operated in different different names and some of the future looking companies had marketing departments also. There also were some difficulties faced by Marketing Departments before influencing IT into their process
Less influenced advertising systems
There were limitations in designing advertisements and it was a huge process to create even a small advertisement.
Online marketing was not there
In that era, Online marketing was not there, so all the advantages we discuss about online marketing was only a dream. There was not any concept called e shopping. So all the buying and selling activities were happened in a physical manner.

Consumed much human labor
As we discussed above in the production part, the human labor consumption was high in marketing departments. Because all the stuffs were operated in a physical environment. People was a key factor on that scenario.

Failed in statistics
There were many hardships when marketing managers had to use statics for their decisions, all of them were manually collected, manually written data. And creation of information out of those data, took so much of time. Some information was unable to compare due to the high amount of data used to create them.

 

Human Resource Department


As we mentioned above, those departments faced high consumption of human labour. All the human labor consumption problems were end up with human resource department. So that is the main significant difficulty faced by HR departments in pre-IT era. And there were some other limitations too
Difficulties in creating payrolls
Creating payrolls was such a brain teasing duty at that time. Most of the HR managers’ time was spent on this task during the last weeks of month. And not only was that, calculating the allowances and other stuffs manually for each employee using the attendance signing sheets was a long task, specially when it comes to companies operate with thousands of employees.


Probability of cheating and frauds
In lots of businesses, the only way of marking the attendance of the employees was the attendance-signing sheet. This system was a failure method which led to lots of cheats. Specially when we consider about a huge company which had thousands of employees, HR managers were stressed in spotting the cheats on these attendance sheets and supervision methods were also complicated and expensive.

Finance Department


This is the department, which is responsible for producing financial reports and statements. The high human labor cost, Back office stress, cheats and frauds problems were same on this departments also before the IT era. And there were some other difficulties
Human Faults/Less accuracy
In creation of Financial Reports, all the entries were done by human hand, so there were much more probabilities to occur mistakes. And the accuracy in mathematical calculations, data were not in a level of satisfaction

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