Business Domains

As a result of the Indian education system and having had a wide and rich exposure to global businesses I have come to realize a huge gap in our education system.

As far as I can remember nobody told us ever that these are broadly the domains where a student can aspire or prepare to join after graduation. Domains like Supply Chain Management, Finance, Insurance, Retail, Healthcare, Entertainment, Foundry or Semiconductors, Utilities and Energy or Resources.

Why do we need to teach these subjects in school or colleges..well simply because look around and you will see that every big company organizes itself according to these broad category of business units or every small company associates itself with one of these domains.

Ofcourse there could be others but lets just first understand these major domains.

Why do big companies organize themselves based on these business units is because DOMAIN LEARNINGS is of huge importance in todays's world!!! And so with a group of employees organized to learn the basics of a business and then the tricks of the trade and maturing into a well established mechanism to run and grow and innovate the business is why a set of people are tagged to one domain.
Such employees establish themselves as Subject Matter Experts or SMEs.

Now we have schools and colleges teaching us basic subjects involving 16 years of education where almost none of these domain areas are touched upoun.

You have MBA schools teaching processes and strategy skills which is also ok..and then there are universities in the western world offering coatly courses on these or some domains but what gets taught are very basic info..


Lemme talk about the areas that I have come across in my working life.

Supply Chain Management
This begins at the farm..lets say a farmer grows cotton or food products. The produce is sold to traders who organize storage and transportation to the markets and factories.

The cotton gets made into cloth. The cloth is bought by garment companies. A part of SCM or Supply Chain Management is Product Lifecycle Management.

Garment manufacturers come up with product Ideas and provide input to Planning departments. The Planning is finalized and Technical Specifications and Costing or Costsheets are generated by the Factory SMEs.
The orders are placed to factories or Vendors and the final product of Shirts, Trousers and other Appparel or Home Goods are bought by the Buyers.
A buyer here means the Retailer who will choose what he wants to sell in his shop.
Once the products get bought by customers like us the sales data becomes input feedback for the planning team to revise, drop and continue products.

SCM has other functions like Waste Management, Recipe management for food industry and these in turn have government mandated Regulations to be adhered to.

Change Management function within PLM is a big area for bigtime companies like Aircrafts and Vehicle making companies as these businesses keep upgrading a basic design over several years.
Imagine a aircraft with thousands of components making up sub assemblies and then these sub assembly components form the parent product and hence the term Bills of Materials. A BOM consists of a Parent Child relationship of parent assembly with sub assembly or components as the child components.
A rollup engine calculation component to compare the old vs new product cost to compare various vendors was one of my best software development achievements!!!

Industrial testing of products based on international testing standards and manuals is another domain where IT companies provide services to.

SAP a leading software product company has developed software modules for many such domains with a form or a webpage to store and manage the very minimum basic business attributes for many such basic business domains ..however these basics get sold for millions ..humm haan..hneh hnehh ..heehaww heehawww ..u goatiess..

Next is Insurance and I guess I have already blogged about most of the basics..

On Finance domain I have very limited knowledge but what I know is that it is a domain full of gold and dirt!!!
Gold is the positive constructive fundamentals that enable positive use of collective wealth and resources for the good of society.
However inefficient and unethical and mentally sick n greedy people have spread enormous diagust in this domain and are suffering and pulling weak peoole into their miseries.

So for people who want to get into Finance domain and eapecially businesses related to Europe and US should be highly careful and mentally strong to resist and tackle the idiots in the system else they will pull you into their miserable world.

Irrespective of the work you get into you should get one thing straight, there are billions of good work opportunities all around the world ..so if someone asks you to do something wrong the only thing you should do is not support it and move on to the next good thing.

So within Finance we have 2 domains ..Retail banking that you and me do as customers and Commercial banking that companies do.
Retail banking involves creation and maintenance for CASA accounts i.e. Current and Savings accounts, Fixed Deposits, Loans and Credit Cards though this system is managed seperately. Money Markets is a term used for lending loans to small businesses.
Neft is used for funds transfer and involves software components establsihed both on the bank side and RBI side. TCS is one of major companies that has been developing most of such central banking infrastructure.
Infosys and iFlex have been other companies who have products like Flex Cube Retail and Flex Cub Commercial for Retail and Commercial banking, again these product offer basic pages for each of the type of functions with minimal attributes and the rest is always customization that costs banks whopping sums of money..goatie LOL..yeah we shudnt be so negative about everything in life na..so lets move on..

Commercial banking is about big money transfers and with such amounts a delay of hours could generate significant amounts of interests.. Islamic banking on the other hand does not have the concept of interest!!!

Commercial banking has money transfers through Swift systems. Letters of Credit is a big concept that is involved here that involves banks across countries issue trust and collateral based assurance provided to businesses so that businesses can trust each other based on the Bank's assurance.

Taxation I guess is taught well in commerce courses however in real life most Tax consultants are confused about the rules and governments till date have for some spineless reasons kept the tax rules hazy and have till date no well defined system that is accessible to the general public.

 

Be it Healthcare, Finance or any old domain that has several well established large companies..the stories are quite murky because these companies have made enormous wealth over years and when you have wealth and the virtues are weak corruption is bound to happen.

So people who start jobs must do severe research on the signs and patterns of any company. A healthy and ideal work culture should look healthy..if things dont seem good move away.. big names does not mean goood things always.

Semiconductors Domain - A seminconductor factory is known as a foundry, Product Catalogs and Samples are common things. TBContinued..

Entertainment - Metadata business.. TBContinued

Healthcare...

Energy and Resources ..have no idea about this..any basic knowhow comments are welcome :-)

Defence domain As part of my 3 year exposure with the Defence domain the knowledge of the following algorithms that are usually taught as part of MTech courses. While there is more to it, manged to atke out an hour to jot down the following basic learnings.
Engineering courses teach about an algorithm named Fourier Series Algorithm - During the 16th year of my career I learnt it is used for Telecommunication signal engineering and at the same time a friend randomly suggested the name of a technique named audio fingerprinting.
On downloading a open source code for audio fingerprinting that recognises a wav file that you can record on your mike and match the digital signature with a library of wave files and pinpoint the matches wav file. This principle is used in Music automated recognition products like Shazam and similar products..could be used in vehicles or hi end car audio video systems to recognise a song that you can sing and create a digital fingerprint using the algorithms and then match it with a similar fingerprint from the cluster on the internet and playback the song in the car - thereby auto sales teams can market this feature as a safe driving enabler feature.
Tech details pending ..but this is a subject of MS and PHD and a miniscule % of people have laid their hands on this in the entire human world so just trying to jot down my misunderstandings 🙂and generate interest amongst newbies on what's possible and what's out there to explore...
The Line Of Sight Algorithm If you stand on a hill and need to talk on radio handsets you would need the other person with the radio handset to be in your line of sight.
So if you are on a hill and the other person is on the hill as well but at a lower height ..maybe you can talk But if you are on a hill and the other person is in a deep jungle Or if you are in a suburb and there are buildings in between you and the other person. Combine the above algorithm use cases and what you have is one of the most complicated problems - a senior once told me there has been no research on these subjects since the 1950s 😃
So comming back to the basics - you are on a hill and the second person is at a lower height or on the ground - what mathematical formula you learnt in school applies here ? You can consider your feet level as the base and draw a straight imaginary line till the bottom of the point where the first person is located. Then you draw a imaginary line from the bottom to the head of the first person and finally you would need a imaginary line at an angle from the head of the first person to the head of the second person.
Isn't this Pythagoras theorem..well yeah most of us don't remember and don't care as well cause Colors channel has great soap episodes and we are happy - well that's the reason you are happy cause some people broke their heads learning these subjects.
So lets move on for the ones who take delight in learning about these highly complicated things just for the sake of it cause what's life if there's something that can confuse you thoroughly and you keep chewing on it for years 😇
So the tough part in the above excercise is to find out the angle from person 1 to 2's location and then draw a imaginary line with points plotted at certain intervals like 2 meters.
Now what you will need is a Digital Terrain Data DTD file that is provided by GIS systems/ companies that fetch this data through satellites.
So you now compare the elevation data with each point you plotted at the angle between the 2 people.
The DTD file has latitude, longitude and the elevation of that point. The points you plotted should also have the latitude longitude and the elevation number maybe in feets inches or meteres of the plotted point. If the elevation of the hill at some point is greater than the plotted point it would mean there is an obstruction !!!
This is how a basic Line of Sight algorithm works. Search for Bresenham algorithm on the internet and it has the software solution to this part of the problem.
Now in reality LOS for Radio handsets is not so simple 😂as a straight line.. it's usually elliptical..so now you need to study about the Fresnel radio los algorithms.