- Marketing research
- Customer care
- Sales promotion and advertising
- Preparing sales budgets and forecasts
- Providing support services to sales staff, credit clearance and credit control
- Sales administration, for example, processing orders and preparing quotations
- Identifying and implementing the marketing mix
In order to fulfil these responsibilities, the marketing department will have to work closely with the finance, purchasing, production and transport departments.
ADMINISTRATION FUNCTION
Every business needs to be organised in order to achieve its objectives. The purpose of the administration system in a business which enables the business to function smoothly. It co-ordinates or brings together the various parts of the business so that they all work towards the same goals.
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT (R&D)
The purpose of R&D is to enable an organisation to compete successfully and achieve a permanently sustainable competitive edge over its competitors by becoming more efficient and/or profitable and giving customers added value. To achieve this the activities of the R&D section could include:
- Developing new products, materials and processes
- Creating new services
- Changing/improving existing products
- Finding new uses for products
- Testing products for strength, quality, safety ect
- Collecting, analysing and cataloguing data from worldwide research which could be of help to the business
All R&D investment involves taking risks. There is no guarantee of commercial success and the majority of R&D expenditure ends in failure.
Effectively combining the functions
It is essential the functional areas of an organisation are combined effectively if the organisation is to meet its objectives.
The best way of getting the various functions of an organisation to pull in the same direction is to create a clear set of company objectives
Examples of Company Objectives
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How the functions combine to meet these objectives?
Organisational charts
Organisational charts are charts that show the structure of an enterprise and the relationship between the various members of the organisation and what the key responsibilities are. A clear chart will show:
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Hierarchical Structure
A hierarchy is a series of levels of people, each level controlled by the level controlled by the level above it.
Large organisations may have thousands of employees. They are likely to have a more elaborate and ‘tall’ organisational structure which has:
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Businesses can organise themselves internally in a number of ways. The two main structures are:
Functional structures
An organisational structure which is functional is illustrated below
A functional structure:
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Each horizontal level represents a step in the level of importance and responsibility of the staff
- The managing Director is responsible for communicating company policy and making sure it is carried out
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The other directors are responsible for making decisions affecting their function area and communicating those decisions to the people working in the function areas
- Managers are in charge of the departments; they are responsible for carrying out or delegating the directors decisions, their role is to organise their staff, to motivate them and to ensure that their staff know what is going on in the organisation
Responsibility, Authority and Delegation
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