Prerequisite Understanding

What is a Business System?

The phrase “business system” can refer to any computer system supporting business operations, but here we mean it to be something very specific: a system used to coordinate business activities across different operating units of a company or corporate division and to record the results of those activities.

Historically such systems have been called “Enterprise Resource Planning” (ERP) systems. This term is still used broadly today, but we’ll not use this term in our documentation. ERP systems are widely viewed negatively and with good reason: companies building and implementing ERP systems offer sprawling, labyrinthine applications that are difficult to configure and operate, are sold with expensive professional services implementation engagements, and often times are sold on false promises of seemingly effortless benefit. While some of these realities of ERP system adoption are unavoidable, others are simply the result of low quality offerings designed to maximize software and service profits without incurring the expense of developing higher quality products.

Our position is that there is real value that can be extracted from a business system implementation so long as the offering is built understanding business realities and that the staff tasked with incorporating these systems into their business operations understand the system realities and the related trade-offs of utilizing system functions and features.

The Obvious

Adding detail to our initial definition of “business system”, we can describe what business system software is in terms that will be familiar to those that use it on a daily basis.

Business systems coordinate and record business activities through the entry of “transaction documents” (transactions) into the system. These transactions record the activities of typical business functional areas:

Internally Servicing Departments

Operating Departments

Naturally, the lists above can be constructed differently, at different granularity, or using other organizing principles but the gist is that all these different areas of the business can be operated from a full featured business system. Implicit in running in a common system, and a benefit of so doing, is that cross-functional activities can be coordinated and reported on without having to create ad hoc processes to do so; the business system provides the framework for collaboration and reporting across all of the business’s units.

Three Fundamental Goals

Looking beyond the individual features that are offered by typical business systems, such systems can be reduced to three principle activities or functional areas of concern:

Accounting

The accounting function is geared toward reporting on the financial outcomes of the business’s activities, ensuring that those activities were conducted in accordance with the company’s policies, and are recorded accurately.

The primary product of the accounting function is the corporate financial statements prepared for investors, lending institutions, and regulatory/taxing authorities. To ensure that financial statements are accurate, and to limit risks to the business, controls are established regarding which members of staff may conduct business on behalf of the company and dictate the standards to which business transactions are recorded. Finally, reconciliation and audits of the business records and financial statements are conducted to find errors or unauthorized transactions.

Importantly, this is the domain of financial accounting were the accurate recording and reporting of information is done under the auspices of the professional accounting standards (i.e. the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles or the International Financial Reporting Standards) or according to the rules of the pertinent regulatory or taxing authorities.

Business Operations Support

Supporting business operations involves maintaining records of business relationships and entities (in the general sense), process automation, and facilitating business communication between staff members internally and with business partners externally.

Initially and on an ongoing basis staff will create lists of entities in the system which are pertinent to business operations. Entities may include relationships such as vendors and customers or other kinds of entities such as products or company facilities. These entities will then be used to standardize the recording of business transactions in the system.

Transaction processing from the business operations perspective is principally focused on managing the life-cycle of the transactions. A sales quote may eventually become a sales order which in turn will need to be fulfilled or it may be cancelled or the product eventually returned for some reason. This all has bearing on what actions must be performed by staff. Reviewing transactions in the system can indicate to staff what work must be done or is no longer needed.

As transaction processing moves through the business system, the system can centralize and facilitate communication across operating departments and even with relevant third parties. In our sales example from the previous paragraph, a shipping department may record that a product on the sales order is not available which the sales department will be able to see; the sales demand from the order may cause an automatic purchase order for the product to be placed with the appropriate vendor.

The information consumed by staff performing business operations work will tend to be granular to a specific process, activity, and/or location, will be produced for relatively narrow windows of time, and may consist of representations of financial data which may conflict with similar reports generated for purely accounting purposes. For an example of operational/accounting information disparities we turn to a retail industry scenario. A common operating procedure in physical retail stores is to reconcile the cash receipts and sales processed by each cashier at the end of their shift. During this process, from the operational perspective of the cashier, the regular sale of products and the “sale” of store credit in the form of “gift cards” is often simply considered “sales” for which the cashier is responsible despite the fact that only the sale of products are “sales” from the accounting perspective; from the accounting perspective “gift cards” are to be recorded as liabilities and reported as such. That store staff performing cashier reconciliations will conflate sales and liabilities during the checkout procedure is completely understandable however: the revenue/liability distinction doesn’t change the amount of customer cash taken and for which the cashier is responsible. Worrying about the accounting distinction while closing out the cashier’s shift will only serve to complicate that business operations process without adding any benefit aside from reporting consistency.

Analytics

Information collected in support of business operations or for accounting can be used to gain deeper insights into the functioning of the business relative to the planning of managers, may be used to uncover opportunities, or expose risks. The range of analytics can cover anything from the basic regular reporting of key performance indicators to more advanced trending and statistical analysis of operations.

Analytic reporting is in the domain of management accounting practices. Representations of financial information may depart from those of financial accounting and the financial statements. For example, many manufacturing businesses use the Standard Cost methodology of inventory item costing which uses projected costs for items and inventory analysis rather than costs derived from actual transactions; this is helpful for understanding variances from the planned costs of manufacturing, but is not allowed for valuation purposes by any of the financial accounting standards.

Also unique to the analysis area of concern is the greater importance of long range concerns. Analysis of results and projects may well include multiple years of past results or project performance into the distant future. Accounting and business operation concerns, however, are usually much more immediate and sensitive to current conditions.

User Intent

When a user sits down to use the system, they are typically doing so in service of only one of the three areas of concern described above. This isn’t to say that an individual staff member will only ever be interested in a single area of concern, but rather that any one task to be completed will focus on a single area of concern.

Therefore any given feature of a business system or information product that system produces will typically be designed to support the needs of a specific area of concern so that a user’s task may be completed as efficiently and clearly as possible.

Presentation

Because business system functionality is likely to be facilitating a specific user task within a specific area of concern, the system needs to present its interface and results in way that makes it clear what the scope, applicability, and limits of the function or result are while maintaining clarity. This can be a difficult balance to achieve, but it is essential for success.