Accounting

Many accounting and accounting-related professionals are skilled in financial analysis, but most are not skilled in managerial or cost analysis. This is especially the case for process manufacturing environments (for example, a bottling plant or a chemical factory). To provide professional accounting and financial services, one must understand the industry, its product, and its processes. As accountants, we have an ethical responsibility to develop this understanding before offering services to clients in these areas.

For this week’s discussion, select a company with which you are familiar. Discuss how you would obtain an understanding of key business processes of a company that hires you to provide financial services. Include in your answer, steps to follow to gather your information. Be sure to use at least one reference from a professional journal or industry magazine.

ANSWER

Business Processes

Business processes are a collection of tasks performed in an organization’s operations and management. Business processes create data that needs to be captured, monitored and measured. Key business processes are the processes that have the most significant impact on the customers, employees and the bottom line. Key business processes usually answer the question of how value is generated in an organization. Understanding the key business processes in a business helps focus investments and energy in the right direction (Saito, 2019). If I was hired for financial services, the first step is identifying the key business processes of the said company. For example, Walmart’s key business processes include the designing of goods and services. This is a decision area of operations management and involves strategic characterization of the company’s retail products. After identifying the key business processes, the next step is ranking key business map activities undertaken with each process. It is also essential to match the resources to activities.

After understanding the key business processes, it is also important to rank them in order of importance. The level of importance depends on the role in which they play in achieving the business objectives and delivering output (Song et al., 2019). At Walmart, I would ensure that I am asking the relevant questions on the key business processes and how they contribute to the company’s objective. This can also be understood through going through the company’s financial books. The financial books will direct me on the processes that get a lot of attention and how they align with the objectives. To understand the key business processes is would first define my goals, plan and map my process, set action, implement the process and monitor the results. This process can be repeated to enhance understanding.

References

Saito, S. (2019, May). Understanding Key Business Processes for Business Process Outsourcing Transition. In 2019 ACM/IEEE 14th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE) (pp. 35-39). IEEE.

Song, R., Vanthienen, J., Cui, W., Wang, Y., & Huang, L. (2019, June). Towards a comprehensive understanding of the context concepts in context-aware business processes. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Subject-Oriented Business Process Management (pp. 1-10).