Corporate Activities, Business Operations, and Office Tools
Core concepts
This domain connects business operations to the information systems that support them. Understand the typical corporate functions-sales, procurement, production, accounting, human resources-and the management cycle of plan-do-check-act (PDCA). Learn the purpose of core systems such as ERP (integrating company-wide resources), SCM (supply chain), and CRM (customer relationships), and how they differ.
Know basic accounting and financial concepts: profit/loss, revenue vs cost, and the idea of break-even. Understand business process modeling at a conceptual level and why documenting workflows matters.
Office tools: be able to reason about spreadsheets (relative vs absolute references, formulas, sorting/filtering, charts), word processors (styles, mail merge), and presentation software. Understand what a macro automates and the risk of running untrusted macros.
Traps
Questions confuse ERP with CRM: ERP integrates internal resources (finance, inventory, HR); CRM focuses on customer-facing data. Spreadsheet traps: copying a formula with a relative reference shifts the cell; an absolute reference ($A$1) does not. A chart type mismatch (pie for trends) is a common distractor.
Worked example
A formula =B2*$C$1 in row 2, copied to row 3, becomes =B3*$C$1: the row-relative B2 shifts, the absolute C1 stays fixed.
Rule of thumb
For each system, ask "whose data does it primarily manage?"-internal resources (ERP), suppliers (SCM), or customers (CRM).