READING RACE ABOUT FUNCTIONAL AREAS OF BUSINESS

The objective of this activity is to help students to categorize the different business areas of a firm and to identify the main goals of each area.

In order to develop this activity, the class is divided into different groups. Before starting the activity, the teacher will have hung some cards related to each area around the class and will hand out a sheet with several questions about these areas to each group. Once this is done, all the group participants must read the questions and one by one must get up and try to find out the answer for those questions in the before mentioned cards. The first group in completing the questionnaire will be the winner.

 

The cards are:

Marketing/sales: Marketing is primarily concerned about satisfying customer needs and wants to get a profit at the same time. A marketing strategy typically starts with pointing out target customers and for it Markets Researches are done. These decisions help to guide the marketing mix, which includes the product, distribution, promotion, and price.

           

Production: It is the main activity because without it the company couldn’t exist. Products are made in it but we should consider that not every company have this area. Only factories have it because the rest are commercial companies that trade products which afterwards are sold without any transformation.

Finance and accounts: The finance area is in charge of getting money from different resources as bank loans, stock market or other kinds of companies to business can work. It is very common that in this area the accounts and investments activities could be found. Accounts are in charge of giving information about what the company does and about what happens inside it, for example profits, sales, debts,… And investments area is where it is decided what the company should invest in such as buying a new machine, launching a new product or investing left money in the stock market.

Human Resources: This is the area which deal with workers and different activities are done in it like recruitment staff, motivate workers, training, employing, making payslips… Not all companies have this area, SMEs usually delegate this kind of task in others such as consultancies , this situation is called outsourcing.

The questioner will be:

1.    What is the most important area in a business?

2.    Which area are profits calculated in?

3.    What is marketing area in charge of?

4.    What do you understand by outsourcing?

5.    What does marketing-mix include?

6.    Give examples of activities that are developed by Human resources.

7.    What kinds of businesses exist according to the production area?

8.    Which area is in charge of getting financial resources?

9.    Can you name some investments that a company can do?