Overview

A corporation, also known as a firm or company and abbreviated as "corp", is a private enterprise that is formed for a specific purpose (e.g., manufacturing, retail, finance and transportation). A corporation can be small or a large international corporation with offices in different parts of the world. 

Figure1 shows conceptual view of a general corporation that can be customized to represent a very large number of corporations. This high level "business pattern" shows the following functional areas of a corporation:

·       The Common Administrative Functions such as customer support, marketing, sales, human resources, finance and accounting, and corporate management. These common functions, represented as blue boxes, are needed by all organizations, large or small.

·       The Industry Specific Functions that represent Primary and Additional (Secondary) Business Services. For example, a retail store may also provide its transportation services for specialized items (e.g., Amazon using its own drones to deliver specialized goods). In this case, retail is primary and transportation is a secondary service. Different industry specific functions, represented as yellow boxes, are naturally needed by different corporations.  

The interactions between various functional areas are also shown in Figure1. It should be noted that each functional area can be viewed as a “department” or “division” of a corporation.  For example,  sales and marketing departments can be easily represented by Figure1.     

Figure1: High Level Business Pattern of a Corporation –  Common Plus Industry Specific Services

Figure 2 shows a more detailed business pattern of the general corporation -- it shows the services (business processes - BPs) in each functional area. For example, it shows four business processes of sales and 5 of corporate management. In addition, it also shows what BPs are conducted in each department and the interactions between various BPs. This detailed business pattern can be further expanded and customized to represent a very large number of corporations around the globe. Figure3 shows a sample corporate portal that can be used to support typical corporations.

Figure2: Detailed Business Pattern of a Corporation (Business Process Level)

Figure3: Conceptual View of a Corporation Portal

Additional Information: How to Develop Different Company Models in SPACE

SPACE uses the patterns shown in Figure1 and Figure2 as the foundation for developing a very wide range of Company Models by using the following steps:  

·       Step1 shows all possible sectors supported in SPACE (see a sample list in Exhibit1). SPACE automatically creates a service bundle that includes the Common Administrative Services.

·       Step2 allows the users to select any of the listed sectors shown in Exhibit1 as a Primary Sector  (e.g., retail, healthcare, education). SPACE shows the services of that sector so that a user can customize the list of services, if needed.

·       Step3 allows the users to include Additional Sectors to the company. For example, a healthcare company may add education and consulting as Additional Sectors. This is a very powerful capability for creating hybrid corporation models.

The basic premise of this process is that all companies must have core Administrative Services (e.g. CRM, Marketing, Sales, HR, Finance, Corp Mgmt). Then the Primary and other Sectors can be added to enrich corporation model.