Tps - A Transaction Processing System

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Introduction

Transactions are the routine day-to-day activities performed by most organisations.

· some are commercial transactions (buying, selling products and services, paying bills etc)

· others involve recording or retrieving data (making a booking, enrolling a student at university looking up results etc)

Most individual transactions are relatively simple, but in most organisations, there are very large numbers of them - so speed and efficiency are important considerations.

What is a TPS?

A transaction is any business-related exchange such as a payment to an employee, a sale to a customer, and a payment to a supplier.

- A Transaction Processing System (TPS) is an organized collection of people, procedures, databases, hardware and software to record completed business transactions.

- Most TPSs consist of all the components of a CBIS including databases, telecommunications, people, procedures, software and hardware.

- For most organizations, the TPS is the basis of the day-to-day activities that occur in the normal course of business, adding value to its products or services.

Transactions

Transaction processing is often the core of most major activities in organisations and the systems that collect this data often support other systems that might be decision support, management information or executive information.

A transaction is a fundamental unit of activity in organisations and are generally indivisible. They often involve multiple steps, but if any of the steps fail then the whole transaction cannot proceed

Analysing transaction patterns and volumes of transaction data is an important middle management activity in any business process.

Objectives of a TPS

¨Increase labor efficiency

¨Capture, process and store transactions and produce output

¨Maintain error-free data input and processing

¨Ensure data and information integrity

¨Produce timely documents and reports

¨Provide increased and enhanced service

¨Increase customer loyalty

¨Achieve competitive advantage

Early systems

Typically, transaction processing business processes were among the first to be automated/computerised in most organisations, thus a lot of this early work with this type of system provides the foundation for current thinking about information systems.

The reason behind this is that:

· computer equipment was relatively expensive in these early days

· these systems were among the easier to create

· small savings in the costs to process large numbers of transactions added up to significant amounts that would cover the costs of the expensive equipment

· few other business processes within typical organisations could provide these benefits

At this point, it is also worth noting that centralised systems were initially easier to control and could achieve economies of scale. Grosch's Law claimed that computing power was proportional to the square of the cost of the processor – this favoured ever larger centralised mainframes over smaller distributed systems.

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