Core Functional Areas

Brief introduction of core functional areas

The business growth depends upon the creation of separate departments which function according to their specific objectives and according to their paths. They are structured according to various requirements of the business; these departments also differ from one organization to another. Knowing of the different functional departments is important for everyone within organization and outside organization such as stakeholders. Some of the major functional areas are human resource, marketing, sales, customer service support, finance and accounting, distribution, research and development, production, administration, operations, IT support department, purchase department and legal department. Functional areas are the grouping of activities on the basis of their needs on one or more tasks. In many cases, it is also defined as business units.

When did Core functional areas start and by whom

The functional department model can be used to understand the different functions of the organization effectively. It is a structured representation of the various functions within a system. It takes into consideration software engineering and systems engineering. A functional model is one which graphically represents the enterprises function within the scope. The functional model defines the processes and models and assists in the discovery of different information helps in the identification of different opportunities, and helps in determining the prices and costs of the product. The functional perspective is the perspective of the business process modelling and various other perspectives of organizational or others. The perspectives basically discuss about the store, the flow, the external entity and the process. The process discusses the transformation of input into output, storing perspective deals with data storage, the flow perspective deals with the movement of material or data. External entity refers to modelled systems. Functional decomposition refers to the process of resolving functional relationship in a way that helps in the creation of the original function.

The need for Core functional areas

The Core functional areas basically comprise of the following departments in order to carry out the activities properly. The Human resource department looks all the people of the organization which is the most important asset of the organization and it is the duty of the HR department to look after recruitment and others. The marketing department looks after advertising and promotional activities which is the best way to communicate with the customers in order to know the company’s goods and services. Effective promotional activities and marketing activities determine the success of the company in the long run. Customer service support is responsible for marinating good relationship with customers. Sales department plays a very important role in generating revenue for the organization. The finance and accounts department is responsible for maintaining the company’s financial resources. The research and development department looks after innovation and other creational activities.

Uses of the core functional areas

There are different roles played by each of the department that makes it necessary to make use of the functional areas. The employees belonging to the different functions have got certain roles in it to achieve the company goals. For instance, it is the duty of the Human resource department to look after the management of the people in the organization effectively from their recruitment to their training and development to the time they leave the organization. Cross-functional teams refer to functional areas in which there are multiple roles in the business. For instance, the people belonging to the accounts department can look after various other activities. Teams that are cross-functional include employees belonging to different departments.

Criticism of core functional areas

Organizations were traditionally divided into different departments such as IT, Human resource, marketing and others. However, as the organizations is changing departmentalization is taking place which refers to the grouping of different departments together in order to have a unified organizational structure. The main advantage of departmentalization is that the organization can make use of the skills and capabilities and knowledge of different people at the same time. However, there may be some issues such as lack of proper communication between the employees of the organization or the departments. The main disadvantage of the traditional model was that people felt there existed different forms of discrimination.

Related topic and concept of core functional areas

Core functional areas refer to all those functional areas of the organization that helps in carrying out different activities of the organization in order to achieve the overall objectives of the organization. Each department is responsible for looking after various activities. Some of the major functional units of the organization are- Human resource, Marketing, Production, sales, accounts and finance department and others. For instance, the HR department looks after the management of people properly in the organization. The Marketing department looks after advertising and other activities.