Week 3 – Strategic Decision Making

Define TPS & DSS, and explain how an organisation can use these systems to make decisions and gain competitive advantages

A transaction processing system (TPS) is a business system that serves the operational level in an organisation. A decision-supporting system (DSS) models information to aid managers and business professional during the decision making process. A TPS can supply transaction-based data to the DSS. from here, the DSS summarises and aggregates the information from the many different TPS systems which assists managers in making important decisions. the TPS helps gather the information, assess than provide decisions for DSS to gain a competitive advantage.

Describe the three quantitative models typically used by decision support systems.

Sensitivity analysis: this is the study of the impact that changes in one or more parts of the model compared to other parts of the model. Changes are made to the value of one variable repeatedly and are then observed to gain the information on the resulting changes of the other variable.


What-if analysis: this checks the impact of a change with an assumption on the proposed solution. This is repeated until all the effects of various situations are understood.


Goal-seeking analysis: this aims to find the inputs that are needed to achieve certain goals such as a desired level of output. It sets a target value for a variable then repeatedly changes other variables until the target value is achieved.

Describe a business processes and their importance to an organisation.


A business process is a standardised set of activities that undertake a certain task. They transform a set of inputs into a set of output for another person or process by utilising people and tools. This is important to an organisation as it helps to anticipate bottlenecks, eliminate duplicate activities, combine related activities and identify smooth running processes. Organisations are only as effective as their processes. They essentially help the business to achieve their goals.


Compare business process improvement and business process re-engineering.


Business process improvement (BPI) attempts to understand and measure the current process and make performance improvements accordingly while business process re-engineering (BPR) analyses and redesigns the workflow within and between businesses. They both rely on different schools of thought. BPR assumes that current process is irrelevant while BPI aims to improve on current process.

Describe the importance of business process modelling (or mapping) and business process models.


Business process modelling creates a detailed flowchart or process map of a work process, displaying inputs, tasks and activities in a structured sequence. a business process model presents a graphic description of a process showing the sequence of a process task, that is created for a certain reason. These are aimed to:
  expose process detail gradually and in a controlled manner;


 encourage conciseness and accuracy in developing the process model;


 focus attention on the process model interfaces; and


 provide a powerful process analysis and consistent design vocabulary