CHAPTER 2

* Overview of Business Processes

SUGGESTED ANSWERS TO DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

2.1 Table 2-1 lists some of the documents used in the revenue, expenditure, and human resources cycle. What kinds of input or output documents or forms would you find in the production (or conversion) cycle? Students will not know the names of the documents but they should be able to identify the tasks about which information needs to be gathered. Here are some of those tasks: * Requests for items to be produced * Documents to plan production * Schedule of items to be produced * List of items produced, including quantity and quality</inst></para></question><question id="ch02ques02" label="2.2"> * Form to allocate costs to products * Form to collect time spent on production jobs * Form requesting raw materials for production process * Documents showing how much raw materials are on hand * Documents showing how much raw materials went into production * List of production processes * List of items needed to produce each product * Documents to control movement of goods from one location to another 2.2 With respect to the data processing cycle, explain the phrase “garbage in, garbage out.” How can you prevent this from happening? When garbage, defined as errors, is allowed into a system that error is processed and the resultant erroneous (garbage) data stored. The stored data at some point will become output. Thus, the phrase garbage in, garbage out. Data errors are even more problematic in ERP systems because the error can affect many more applications than an error in a non-integrated database. Companies go to great lengths to make sure that errors are not entered into a