The business growth depends upon the creation of separate departments that function according to their specific objectives and paths. They are structured according to various business requirements; these departments also differ from one organization to another. Knowing the different functional departments is important for everyone and outside the organization, such as stakeholders. 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. In many cases, it is also defined as business units.
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 that graphically represents the enterprise's function within the scope. The functional model defines the processes and models and assists in discovering different information helps identify different opportunities, and helps determine the prices and costs of the product. The functional perspective is the perspective of the business process modeling and various other perspectives of organizational or others. The perspectives discuss 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 modeled systems. Functional decomposition refers to the process of resolving functional relationships in a way that helps in the creation of the original function.
The Core functional areas comprise of the following departments to carry out the activities properly. The Human resource department looks at all the organization's people, which is the organization's most important asset, and the HR department must look after recruitment and others. The marketing department looks after advertising and promotional activities, which is the best way to communicate with the customers 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 relationships with customers. The 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. Finally, the research and development department looks after innovation and other creational activities.
There are different roles played by each department that make 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, the Human resource department must look after the management of 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.
Organizations were traditionally divided into different departments such as IT, Human resources, marketing, and others. However, as the organization is changing, departmentalization occurs, which refers to the grouping of different departments together to have a unified organizational structure. The main advantage of departmentalization is that the organization can use the skills, capabilities, and knowledge of different people simultaneously. However, there may be some issues, such as a lack of proper communication between employees or the departments. The main disadvantage of the traditional model was that people felt there existed different forms of discrimination.
Core functional areas refer to all those functional areas of the organization that helps in carrying out different organizational activities to achieve the organization's overall objectives. Each department is responsible for looking after various activities. Some of the major functional units of the organization are- Human resources, 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.