Graduate Challenge: Business Functions and Interrelationships Report

This report examines the significance of various business functions within an organization, using Sainsbury's as a case study. It highlights the importance of departments like Human Resources, Finance, Production, and Marketing, and how they contribute to overall organizational goals. The report emphasizes the interrelationships between these departments, illustrating how coordination and communication lead to improved productivity, enhanced quality, and efficient resource utilization. It details specific examples of how departments such as HR and Marketing, Finance and Production, and HR and Production are interconnected, ultimately impacting the company's performance and success. The report concludes with a list of references, including books and journals, supporting the analysis of business functions and their interdependencies.

GRADUATE CHALLENGE

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY..................................................................................................................................3
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................3
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................3

MAIN BODY
Importance of different business functions
Every organisation utilisés some key business functions that help them in segregating the
different departments and the roles and responsibilities that are required to be performed
(Business Functions, 2015). This helps in facilitation of a variety of tasks that are to be
completed and also helps in increasing and promoting flexibility as well as communication.
The business functions are similarly catefoirsed in Sainsbury as well where the company as
seperate departments such as Human Resource, Finance, Production, Research and
Development, Marketing department etc. and all the departments perform different activities that
are specific to their department (Sopta and Slavica, 2017).
 Increased coordination: The overall coordination and communication between the diya
fferemt departments representing different functions improve which leads to improved
effects rts and efficiency required for the achievement of goals and objectives.
 Improved productivity: The productivity of the organization i.e. Sainsbury also improves
as the departments understand the requirements of each other and hence are able to work
in the basis of some common grounds and objectives which is extremely difficult for
companies(Sivarajah and et.al., 2020).
 Enhanced Quality: The overall quality of the world beig done also improves drastically
as the focus is on the optimum utilisation of resources where both productivity and
quality are interrelated thus ensuring that no compromise is being done with the entire
work.
Interrelationship amongst them
There are four main departments in Sainsbury as well just as there are in any other organisation
i.e. Marketing department, Human Resource Department, Finance Department and Production
department. All these are strongly connected and interdependent as no individual department can
function individually.
 HR with Marketing: The HR department in Sainsbury is strongly integrated with the
marketing department (Miörner and Trippl, 2019). When the marketing department
makes it clear and specific to the HR department regarding the kind of personnel that
they require for achieving their marketing related targets, HR in turn is able to hire
professionals accordingly. This helps in quicker goal achievement.
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 Finance with Production: The finance department in Sainsbury helps in clealry
communicating the budget that is available for production such as raw materials, labour
etc. Production in return communicates that how much they will require for the
achievement of the targets that they have been given and this simultaneously helps in
better discussion and decisions related to the budgetary amounts.
 HR with Production: In Sainsbury, the production department also understands from the
marketing department that how a particular product is being percieged by the audience
i.e. which features are they liking and which are not approve bed or favourable
(Lohmüller and Petrikhin, 2019) . When they work together like this, not only the quality
of the product gets increased but also the overall productivity and returns from the
products are improved.
 Finance with Marketing: The marketing department again communicates regarding the
budget that is available and how much can they use in the promotional activities or
marketing campaigns for the product (Chatterjee and Milani, 2020). This in turn helps the
marketing department to creatively and innovatively develop mechanisms that can be
used to Target majority of the population i.e. target customer base.
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REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Lohmüller, B. and Petrikhin, A., 2019. Chief Technology Officers: One Mission, Different
Organizational Roles. Journal of Industrial Integration and Management, 4(03),
p.1950005.
Miörner, J. and Trippl, M., 2019. Embracing the future: path transformation and system
reconfiguration for self-driving cars in West Sweden. European Planning
Studies, 27(11), pp.2144-2162.
Sivarajah, U., and et.al., 2020. Role of big data and social media analytics for business to
business sustainability: A participatory web context. Industrial Marketing
Management, 86, pp.163-179.
Sopta, M. and Slavica, A., 2017. Importance of cost function in business decision
making. Economic and Social Development: Book of Proceedings, p.208.
Chatterjee, P. and Milani, F., 2020. Perceived uncertainty shocks, excess optimism-pessimism,
and learning in the business cycle. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 179,
pp.342-360.
Online
Business Functions. 2015. [ONLINE] Available through :<
https://www.businessmanagementideas.com/business/functions-business/business-functions-7-
main-types-of-business-function/3744>
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