Various Business Concepts Essay

1. Define and explain the following terminologies: 
• Just-in-Time Delivery;
• E-Commerce;
• SaaS;
• Strategic planning;
• Supply Chain systems;
• DSS;
• Cloud infrastructure;
• Web 2
• Extranet;
• Big data analysis.

2. What are the key elements of Data Mining? Discuss with Examples.

3. Why understanding the significance of ‘’Reserve Stock Level’’ function of ERP is so critical for the systems’ performance? Explain your answer.

4. Study "Business Continuity with Virtualization"  in your text book [Chapter 2, IT at Work 2.3] and answer the following questions:
a) What business risks had Liberty Wines faced?.
b) How does Liberty Wines’ IT infrastructure impact its competitive advantage?
c) How did server virtualisation benefit Liberty Wines and the environment?

5. Study "Case 2 Business Case: Financial Intelligence Fights Fraud" in your text book [Chapter 3] and answer the following questions:
a) What data and IT problems were limiting FinCEN’s ability to fight financial crime?
b) Describe the IT upgrades and capabilities needed by FinCEN in order to achieve its mission.
c) On what does financial intelligence depend?
d) Why is the ability to identify patterns and relationships critical to national security?
e) Research recent financial crimes that FinCEN has detected and disrupted. Explain the role of data analytics in crime detection.

This is an inventory technique which companies makes use of to apply to be able to increase effectiveness and also decrease on the waste via receiving products merely as they are required in the generation process, therefore minimizing on the cost of inventory (Borgman, 2010).

This relates to the purchasing as well as the selling of the products and the services or maybe transferring of the funds or even the information over a digital network particularly the internet.

This is an end-user application such as the Sales Force.

This is a number of procedures which a company decides on in addition to arranges to their business or even services to be able to maintain the business healthy or in a position to function regardless if the unforeseen events disrupt several of its businesses, markets, products or maybe services (Borgman, 2010).

It is a system of organizations, individuals, activities, data as well as the other resources which are involved in the moving of a product or perhaps a service from the suppliers to the clients (Borgman, 2010).

This an interactive programs which support decision making. Furthermore, it help the unstructured and semi-structured selections (Moss & Marvin, 2016).

This is provided on demand for the storage of virtualization, system virtualization in addition to the equipment virtualization.

It is a term which is given in describing of a 2^nd generation of the World Wide Web that is highlighted the ability for people to collaborate in addition to share information online (Moss & Marvin, 2016).

This is a personal network which employs the World Wide Web technological innovation and public communication technology system to be able to safely share section of the business data or the procedures with the suppliers, vendors and other businesses (Redlich & Nemzow, 2015).

This is the process of examining the large and the varied set of data such as the big data in order to uncover the hidden patterns which are regarded as the correlations, market trends, and the customer preferences as well as other useful data which could assist the organization in making of the informed business decisions (Moss & Marvin, 2016).  

The data mining has various elements such as exploration, reprocessing, and categorizing and modelling (Wilson, 2014). On the exploration, the documents are explored. This could be in type of the simple word counts in a document assortment, or maybe manually creating of the topic areas to be able to categorize on the documents via reading through a sample of them. Another element is reprocessing (Redlich & Nemzow, 2015). Before analysis or the automated categorization of the content, the text could need to be preprocessed in order to standardize it to the extent possible. Categorizing and modeling (Redlich & Nemzow, 2015). The content is then ready to be categorized. Categorizing messages or the documents from the data contained within the could be achieved through use of the statistical model and the rules of the business.

E-commerce

Understanding of the significance of Reserve stock level is vital because it replenishes on the movement of the inventory as well as reserving of the storage of the product particularly downstream (Paul, Kumar & Chatterjee, 2013). The function is significance since it helps in keeping the stock to flow through the supply chain through maintenance of the cost-efficient to the product fill rates. This function helps in prevention of the costly inventory from overstocking.

The major risk to which the organization encountered was to the continued increase in the size, the information technology facility was also getting more information which it did not have the capability of handling (Redlich & Nemzow, 2015). Moreover, their system had begun to slow down and it needed a greater maintenance than before. There was also the loss of the productivity of the workers since more manpower was utilized to handle the scaling up of the organization (Redlich & Nemzow, 2015). Therefore, the core business process had been impacted on this growth. The processing and the inventory management functions had also been affected negatively also.

The IT infrastructure of the liberty Wines organization impacted on their competitive advantage via the reduction of the cost (Redlich & Nemzow, 2015). This happened in the occurrence through the power, the air conditioning and the replacement of various hardware. Some of other ways in which their IT infrastructure could impact their business would be through the enhancement of the resilience as well as the stability through their backup system. In regards to the bottom line was the enhancement of the staff so that they provide better services to the customers via the enhanced productivity (Sook-Ling, Ismail & Yee-Yen, 2015). Moreover, it could be possible in stimulating of the growth of the business in future at a much faster rate.

The virtualization of the servers benefited the organization in a number of ways. One way was through the decrease in the number of the servers from 10 which was the previous number to 4 currently and one of which was the backup (Paul, Kumar & Chatterjee, 2013). Moreover, there was a reduction in terms of the cost of the air conditioning to approximately 60% via an improvement especially in the bottom line as well as the decrease in the carbon footprint (Wilson, 2014). Furthermore, there was the implementation of the program which was much faster and it led to a better utilization hence a better customer services was created that resulted to a better inventory management (Sook-Ling, Ismail & Yee-Yen, 2015). To the virtualization of the servers it led to cutting of the cost for the replacement of the hardware by more than 60%. This was a good thing for the organization since they would save some amount which could be utilized in another sector of the business.

Business Continuity Planning

The data which the finance companies needed to report to the FinCEN had suffered from numerous sporadic when it comes to the quality and they also lacked the affirmation in addition to standardization (Sook-Ling, Ismail & Yee-Yen, 2015). When FinCEN attempted to examine this information, they were confined to the small datasets along with the simple programs required (Paul, Kumar & Chatterjee, 2013). This agency was not able to carry out the evaluation across the enormous group of data and they lacked the capabilities for the proactive analysis in addition to the trend prediction (Paul, Kumar & Chatterjee, 2013). Reporting this information to the agencies was done via various offline methods. These types of combination created it to turn out to be challenging for the FinCEN bureau to detect faster on any specific new and emerging threats which assist in the disrupting of the criminal organizations.

There were various upgrade that were done by FinCEN which are the upgrades on their analytic capabilities, information technology infrastructure, as well as the databases (Paul, Kumar & Chatterjee, 2013). There was need for the analytics to enable a better collection and analyze of the data from the various sources as well as providing then to the federal, state as well as the local regulation enforcements and also regulatory authorities (Paul, Kumar & Chatterjee, 2013). The FinCEN experts were in a position to possess an enhanced analytic along with examination capabilities. The databases were also upgraded, which assisted to convert eleven years of data from their legacy program to the FinCEN new program for the record keeping. Due to certain upgrade in the IT infrastructure, the bureau is able to obtain electronically, practice in addition to store the organization reports (Paul, Kumar & Chatterjee, 2013). In addition, there have been able to release a Query Web based application, which is a new search tool that is accessed by the FinCEN analysts, law enforcements along with the regulatory individuals who are providing real time access to over eleven years of the Bank Secrecy Act data.

It essentially depends on the information technology infrastructure, the data analytic through collection of the standard data in regards to the financial affairs for the entities (Fukuda, Hisazumi, Ishida, Mine, Nakanishi, Furusho & Kong, 2016). They effectively collects on the data, undertaking analysis as well as providing the data to the federal as well as the law enforcement.

The ability to identify the patterns is vital to the national security as they would bring out the lawful activities.

Supply Chain Management

The FinCEN they made an announcement that there was a one million penalty against the sparks nugget Inc., which is in Nevada (Fukuda, Hisazumi, Ishida, Mine, Nakanishi, Furusho & Kong, 2016). They highlighted that this organization had violated the Anti-money Laundering facility of the BSA. Based on the law the Casinos need to implement along with sustain an application for AML that is effective, as well as maintain on the records for various transactions along with the file reports (Fukuda, Hisazumi, Ishida, Mine, Nakanishi, Furusho & Kong, 2016). These reports are significant especially for the investigators to be able to anticipate on the crimes and solving them. According to FinCEN they highlighted that Sparks nuggets had violated on the requirements for the AML program. Such kind of frauds are big challenge especially to the financial organization which they encounter (Borgman, 2010). To be able to fight with these kind of crimes, the banks have adopted to the monitoring of the behavior, analysis of the networks, and the recognition of the patterns to detect these crimes (Sotomayor, Montero, Llorente & Foster, 2009). Moreover, the use of the big data analytics to a great deal could help in detecting of the frauds since the data is collected from multiple sources and then filtered and analyzed accurately.

References

Borgman, C. L. (2010). Scholarship in the digital age: Information, infrastructure, and the Internet. MIT press.

Fukuda, A., Hisazumi, K., Ishida, S., Mine, T., Nakanishi, T., Furusho, H., ... & Kong, W. (2016, July). Towards sustainable information infrastructure platform for smart mobility-project overview. In Advanced Applied Informatics (IIAI-AAI), 2016 5th IIAI International Congress on (pp. 211-214). IEEE.

Luo, F., Zhao, J., Dong, Z. Y., Chen, Y., Xu, Y., Zhang, X., & Wong, K. P. (2016). Cloud-based information infrastructure for next-generation power grid: Conception, architecture, and applications. IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, 7(4), 1896-1912.

Moss, T., & Marvin, S. (2016). Urban infrastructure in transition: networks, buildings and plans. Routledge.

Paul, P. K., Kumar, K., & Chatterjee, D. (2013). Cloud computing emphasizing emerging possibilities to the entire Information Infrastructure. Trends in Information Management, 9(2).

Redlich, R. M., & Nemzow, M. A. (2015). U.S. Patent Application No. 14/597,323.

Sook-Ling, L., Ismail, M. A., & Yee-Yen, Y. (2015). Information infrastructure capability and organisational competitive advantage: framework. International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 35(7), 1032-1055.

Sotomayor, B., Montero, R. S., Llorente, I. M., & Foster, I. (2009). Virtual infrastructure management in private and hybrid clouds. IEEE Internet computing, 13(5).

Wilson, C. (2014). Cyber threats to critical information infrastructure. In Cyberterrorism (pp. 123-136). Springer New York.