B1 Functional Areas
Functional Areas are teams of employees in an area of the business who are working together to achieve a similar goal. These teams of employees may have similar skill sets and experience. Other names for functional areas may include departments and operational areas.
The Human Resources Function is responsible for anything related to staff with the aim of ensuring the organisation has the best talent and gets the best out of them. This includes the recruitment process, payments to staff, training, promotions and dismissal.
The Research and Development Function is the area that focuses on innovation of new products or improvements to existing products.
The Sales Function involves all processes related to making a sale. This could be promoting to the mass market or developing a relationship with clients when marketing a niche.
The Purchasing Function is responsible for buying the supplies of equipment and raw materials for a business. They may develop relationships with suppliers and arrange discounts. They may also compare different suppliers to improve prices or quality.
The Finance Function is responsible for managing the money in the business. They may set each function a budget based on financial predictions, process financial transactions such as paying invoices, keep records of revenue and payments and produce financial documents such as income statements and balance sheets.
The Customer Service Function is responsible for interactions with outside of the actual sales transaction. This may include queries about the product before purchase, after sales service and complaints.
The Marketing Function is responsible for understanding customer needs and working with other functions to ensure that these needs are met in a profitable way. This may involve market research, analysing trends and predicting future trends.
The Production and Quality Function is responsible for manufacturing the company’s products. They may focus on improving productivity and efficiency. Quality can be ensured through quality control or quality assurance.
The IT Function is responsible for setting up and managing the ICT systems within an organisation. This may include hardware such as staff computers and servers as well as software programmes appropriate for the business. The IT Function will also maintain IT equipment, manage firewalls and make improvments to systems where necessary.
The Administration Function is responsible for keeping all other functions organised and providing office support. This may be by keeping documents organised using filing systems, managing phone queries, making bookings and keeping to budgets.
