Business Activities refer the component of information technology infrastructure representing all the business activities in a company whether they are manual or automated.

Business activities utilize all data resources and platform resources in order to performing specific tasks and duties of the company.

For a company to survive in the business, it must have a competitive edge in the arena where multitudes of competitors exist. Competitive advantages can be had by having rigorous and highly comprehensive methods for current and future rules, policies and behaviors for the processes within the organization.

Although business activities broadly relates to optimization practices in business done by people in relation to business management and organizational structure, it is closely and strictly associated with information technology implementation within the company and all its branches if they exist.

Business activities is part of the Information Technology Infrastructure. The Information Technology Infrastructure is the framework of the company dwelling on the approaches for best practices to be translated into software and hardware applications for optimum delivery of quality IT services.

Business activities are the bases for setting management procedures so support the company in achieving the best financial quality and value in IT operations and services.

Different companies generally have common business activities. In general, business activities may be broadly categorized into accounting, inventory, materials acquisition, human resource development, customer relationship management, and products and services marketing.

Although these broad categories may apply to many businesses, companies have differing needs to the categories. For instance, a law firm may not need to acquire raw materials as do furniture companies. Hotels need intensive marketing while an environmental non profit organization may not need marketing at all.

Several vendors sell IT solutions to take care of business activities and expedite manual work by automatic them through computers.

An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is a software based application that integrates all data processes of a company into one efficient and fast system. Generally, ERP uses several components of the software application and hardware system to have the integration. ERP system is highly dependent on relational databases and they it involves huge data requirements. Companies set up data warehouses to feed the ERP.

Data warehouses in business companies are often called Business Information warehouse. They are intelligent data warehouses capable of analysis and reporting. Every day, the extract, transform and load data into the database in an intelligent fashion.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is another automating process to take care the business activity aspect of handling clients and customers of the company. This system captures, stores and analyzes customers data so the company can come up with innovative moves to further please the clients to their satisfaction. Again, the data is stored in the data warehouse or business information warehouse.

Supply Chain Management (SCM) makes the planning, implementation and control of operation related to storage of raw materials, inventory of work in process and point-of-origin to point-of-consumption of finished products.

Supply management system takes care of the methods and process involved in institutional or corporate buying. Corporate buying may include purchasing of raw materials or already finished goods to be resold.

If not for the benefits of installing, information technology infrastructure these business activities would take a long time to finish. Doing these business manually will not just take a long time to accomplish but can also lead to many errors and inconsistencies.

With today’s business trends going towards online marketing and selling, having a good business application software system can bring many advantages and benefits to companies. Investing in an information technology infrastructure many be initially expensive but the return of investments will be long term.