Important Farm Business Terms Define

1. Sole Proprietorship:  A one-person operation. The business may have a number of employees or hired persons; but the proprietor owns, runs, and manages the business.

2. Partnership: An aggregation of owners. Two or more persons contribute their assets to the business and may share the management, responsibility, profits, and losses. Each partner pledges faith in the other partners and stands liable for the actions of all partners within the scope of partnership activities.

3. Limited Partnership: A special form of partnership permitted by state law to have one or more partners whose liability for partnership debts and obligations is limited to their investment in the business. A limited partner is just an investor. If a limited partner participates in management, then liability will exist for all partnership obligations like a general partner. A limited partnership must have at least one general partner who handles the management of the business and who is fully liable for all partnership debts and obligations.

4. Corporation: An artificial being created under state law. A corporation is a separate business entity distinct from its owners, who are called shareholders because they own shares or interests in the corporation. The major characteristic of the corporate form of business organization is this sharp line of distinction between the business and the owners. The corporation is a separate legal entity as well as a separate taxpayer.

5. Tax-Option Corporation: A creation of federal tax law. A corporation in all aspects except that the corporate entity pays no income tax because each shareholder owner reports his or her share of corporate income for income tax purposes on their individual income tax returns. Tax-option corporations are subchapter S corporations.

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Business Services in the UK

This chapter examines business services’ impressive recent record in raising its share of value added and employment in the UK. It considers the sector’s productivity performance, including how business services can have a positive impact on the productivity of the wider economy through the services they provide. It also considers the contribution business service firms are making to UK manufacturing and concludes with a discussion of the level of concentration in these sectors.

All industries in this table are grouped within 2 digit divisions in the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC), and where possible industries are further broken down to a 3 or 4 digit level. Different SIC groupings are quite varied in size by definition, and direct comparisons may at times have limitations. Some groupings within the business services sector are more homogenous than others. The industries contained in the 74 group, ‘other business activities’, are the most diverse. They include a number of well-known professional services (legal and accounting) alongside industrial cleaning and labour recruitment. The 74 category also contains a group entitled ‘miscellaneous business activities’, which in turn has a further category entitled ‘other business activities’ (SIC 74.87). This category includes many important businesses including speciality design activities, conference organisation and brokerage activities and it alone has a GVA of over £15 billion.

Five industry groupings within the sector each generated more than £15 billion in GVA in 2004 – other software consultancy and supply (SIC 72.22), legal (SIC 74.11), architectural and engineering activities (SIC 74.2), labour recruitment (SIC 74.5), and within the miscellaneous group ‘other business activities’ (SIC 74.87). In terms of employment, five industries also provided more than a third of a million jobs – labour recruitment, industrial cleaning, other business activities, architectural and engineering activities, and other software consultancy and supply. The five sectors with the highest numbers of enterprises were other business activities, business and management consultancy, architectural and engineering design, other software consultancy and supply (each with more than 50,000 enterprises), and other computer related activities (with around 32,000).

Why Develop a Business Plan and Who Should Be Involved in the Planning Process?

New and experienced business owners, regardless of history or current situation, can benefit from business planning. As an experienced producer, you may develop a business plan to: map out a transition from conventional to organic production management; expand your operation; incorporate more family members or partners into your business; transfer or sell the business; add value to your existing operation through product processing, direct sales or cooperative marketing. It’s never too late to begin planning! If you are a first time rural land owner or beginning farmer who may be considering the establishment of a bed and breakfast or community-supported agriculture (CSA) enterprise, business planning can help you identify management tasks and financing options that are compatible with your long-term personal, environmental, economic, and community values. Business planning is an on-going, problem-solving process that can identify business challenges and opportunities that apply to your marketing, operations, human resources and finances, and develop strategic objectives to move your business beyond its current situation toward your future business vision. Once developed, your business plan can be used as a long-term, internal organizing tool or to communicate your plans to others outside your business.

Use your business plan to:

• ·         Make regular or seasonal marketi Make regular or seasonal marketing, operations, human resources and finance decisions.
• ·         Pursue long-term personal, economic, environmental and community goals.

Develop a business profile for communicating within or outside your family to potential business partners, lenders and customers. Before you begin working through this Guide, take a few moments to consider where you are in the business life cycle and why you are developing a business plan. Are you just beginning? Ready for growth? Planning to consolidate and transfer out of the business?  Based on your position in the business life cycle, what do you want to accomplish? Do you need to explore a critical finance- or operations-related challenge that you currently face? Research a perceived marketing opportunity? Prepare for an anticipated internal change in human resources? Most likely you have several, interdependent planning motives. This Guide is designed to help you work through many of them. Be aware, however, that retirement and farm transfer issues are not treated directly in the text or Worksheets. If retirement and business transfer are your critical planning issues, you may benefit by working through the first few tasks (identifying values, reviewing your history and current situation, and identifying your vision and goals), before talking with an attorney or financial consultant to help you develop specific business liquidation or transfer strategies.

Business Panaceas Revisited

Given the number and variety of earlier solutions to unsatisfactory corporate performance that failed to fulfil their promise, it is not surprising to discover a degree of scepticism about Business Process Reengineering (BPR), especially as its programmatic and abstract character makes it harder to pin down than recipes for strengthening corporate culture or building quality into every aspect of business activity 10.

Does BPR have a distinctive flavour or is it the same old imperialistic consultancy guff dressed up in new jargon? Needless to say, business consultants have a vested interest in emphasising the novelty and potency of whatever variety of ‘snake oil’ they dispense to managers. But investment in previous recipes also means that they are inclined to interpret the new in terms of the old, and to repackage old wine in new bottles. In turn, this may lead to an overhasty dismissal of BPR as simply the latest in a line of fads that is distinguished from previous panaceas only by its achievement of a new nadir in the inelegance of its terminology. In our view, such treatment is unhelpful if it blinds us to the possibility that BPR represents and promotes something distinctive and innovative in its approach to the restructuring of business practices. In common with previous recipes for improving business performance - from Taylorism to TQM - BPR draws together, synthesises and provides an articulation for ideas and practices that have been floating around in the business world without a catchy label or a champion. 

Though it may represent a new nadir in the inelegance of its terminology, BPR is sufficiently striking, flexible and ambiguous to encompass many programmes and techniques, such as teamworking, and networking and even EPOS (electronic point of sale), that are have contributed to the reorganization of work during the 1980s. What Hammer has done is not so much to concoct a novel recipe but to put a name to an emergent trend in business organization that has been prompted, above all, by an intensification of competition that intensifies the pressures upon executives to seek (radical) ways of gaining competitive advantage. His contribution, like that of earlier guru figures, resides in a flair for packaging and promoting an appealing product in a market where status-conscious consumers are, like the proverbial Emperor, anxious to espouse and sport the latest in management fashions.

Business Process Management (BPM)

The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is the new standard to model business process flows and web services. Created by the Business Process  Management Initiative (BPMI), the first goal of BPMN is to provide a notation that is readily understandable by all business users. This includes the business analysts that  create the initial drafts of the processes to the technical developers responsible for  implementing the technology that will perform those processes.

A second, equally important goal is to ensure that XML languages designed for the  execution of business processes, such as BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution  Language for Web Services) and BPML (Business Process Modeling Language), can be visually expressed with a common notation BPMN is a core enabler for a new initiative in the Enterprise Architecture world.

BPM is concerned with managing change to improve business processes. BPM is unifying the previously distinct disciplines of Process Modeling, Simulation, Workflow, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), and Business-to-Business (B2B) integration into a single standard.  The fact that Business Process Management is a new initiative might lead you to believe that business processes have not been managed previously. This is of course  not true – many organizations have modeled and managed their business processes for years, using an eclectic mixture of tools and techniques.  

These techniques have only been partially successful, or failed outright, because  there has been a lack of standards and a complete lifecycle to control and guide the  design and execution of business processes. Managing the process of change cannot  be an ad-hoc process – it requires management to exercise control over the discovery, architecture, design, and deployment of processes. For management to understand the architecture, design, and deployment of processes, you need business modeling and business execution language standards.

The Bachelor’s degree programme in International Business and Management

The Dutch education system

An academic year has two semesters of 21 weeks each, September to February and February to July. Teaching is done with lectures, tutorials and practicals. It is important that students prepare ahead for lectures as all of the material cannot be covered in the time allotted for them alone. Lecturers focus on main points and on particularly difficult aspects of the assigned literature. Material is explained in more detail in smaller classes and tutorials. Students also discuss the readings and lectures and go over individual assignments and joint work in the tutorials. Practicals give students an opportunity to work together in still smaller groups on assignments and presentations. Usually there is at least one written exam as they are a way to gage progress. Course grades normally are calculated based on exam results and grades earned on assignments.

We use the European credit and transfer system (ECTS) which expresses course workloads and learning outcomes in terms of credits. Generally speaking, one credit represents 28 hours of time spent reading and studying, attending classes, participating in small groups, working on individual

and team projects and the like. It takes 180 credits to earn a Bachelor’s degree: 150 in Groningen and 30 abroad. Each course is 5 credits.

Propaedeutic phase

The first year covers the fundamental disciplines of international business. Courses like international management, economics, financial accounting, as well as international marketing and international business law are part of the first year. You will also build a solid base in statistics. The first year features extensive training in how to read and write academic English. Some of the courses in year one are detailed below.

Business and employers

Students sometimes expect IB&M to be a managerial practice how-to  programme. This is not the case. Students do learn some techniques, but more importantly they study business theories as well as organisations and their settings. It is their intellectual understanding and their sensitivity to differences in perceptions and approaches that equip them to correctly analyse situations - when and where they arise - and to determine effective responses across their entire careers. These are the focus of IB&M.

Facilities

Surroundings are important. Our buildings are modern, comfortable and well equipped. The central library of the university has a core collection for each discipline. We also have our own library with an extensive – and always growing – economics and business collection, plenty of study spaces, meeting rooms, and a plaza café for short breaks. There is free wireless internet access throughout the complex so you can go on the Internet, read and send email, and check for updates on the student intranet (‘nestor’) wich links to just about all programmerelevant information

Programmes in Business Administration

The Committee has based its overall evaluation on the self-evaluation reports it has received and on discussions it has had with research directors and deans and directors of relevant faculties and institutes. The overall impression of the programmes reviewed by the Committee is very good.

Some programmes certainly deserve to be labelled as outstanding. Indeed, a few programmes are certainly among the best in Europe and compare favourably with their academic counterparts in the US. Although it has not been possible to make a detailed comparison with previous evaluation reports, it is the impression of the Committee that academic research in business administration and management in the Netherlands has made good progress. More research is being published in good quality journals, more attention is being paid to PhD programmes and more international contacts have been developed. This progress is very visible in the best performing programmes. The programmes that were good in the past have become even better today.

This assessment of the Committee may at first sight appear contradictory to the fact that the frequency distribution (see table) of the scores by university has now fewer entries in the low scores than in the previous assessment and more in the top scores. The Committee would like to make two comments regarding this shift in the frequency distribution. Firstly, there was no overlap between the current Committee and the previous one which means that the norms and standards may have changed slightly. Secondly, and more importantly, the number, the type and the scale of the programmes have changed such that direct comparisons are very difficult. The main conclusion remains that the Committee in general is very satisfied with the quality of the research if one takes into consideration the size of the research community in the Netherlands and the institutional organization of business economics and management.

The research agenda for the programmes in business administration and management does not appear to be set at the country level. Most of the research topics are derived from themes that have been developed in the US or at the European level. This does not come as a surprise. The biggest countries set the research agenda and the topics that researchers in such countries find relevant for their companies and their economies. Researchers in smaller countries who want to make an international impact have no option but to follow the research agenda set by the leading journals and academic associations abroad. The Committee believes that Dutch academics have been very successful in associating themselves with the international (US and European) research agenda and that they have been able to make good, and occasionally excellent, contributions to the development of the research themes. A negative aspect of this is that the research agenda in the Netherlands is rather narrow and not always related to the problems faced by the local business community. Consequently, the direct relevance of the academic research for the business community has not improved much. This is of course also influenced by the fact that the number of researchers in the Netherlands is naturally smaller than in the larger countries, which inevitably reduces the scope of the research.  Comparisons are very often made with US acade Comparisons are very often made with US academic research. The Committee has also discussed such comparisons. It was concluded that some caution is necessary. In general the Dutch faculties, institutes and research programmes in business administration and marketing are much smaller in size, as measured by number of teaching staff and budgets, than their American counterparts which puts a clear limit on the size of the research teams and the scope of the research agenda.

In the Netherlands this leads to a trade-off between specialization in order to achieve economies of scale and competence on the one hand and the scope of the research agenda on the other. The tendency is that more and more faculties choose specialization, which implies that not all research fields will be adequately covered; in turn, this may have a negative impact on educational programmes that run the risk of becoming less research based. The Committee has also noted that the research evaluation includes all universities and that the findings consequently give an accurate view of overall research performance in the Netherlands. Comparisons with the US are typically only made with the top schools. We think that, as a consequence of this, the average performance of the Netherlands is certainly better than the average performance of American schools.  The Committee was particularly impressed by the fact that research in the Netherlands in this field has become very well linked to the international research community. Although no overall statistics can be given, it is notable that some groups have made major progress in their international positioning and networking. However, groups differ in the degree to which the international efforts have been fully integrated with all members of the group. In some groups visiting professors and scholars seem to be very well integrated in the research and the functioning of the group. Evidence of this can be found in joint publications and involvement with doctoral dissertations. It also appears that the visiting academics help in creating a bridge between the Dutch research group and its foreign counterparts. In such cases, a truly international exchange is developing. However, the Committee has the impression that, in a few cases, the visiting academics are not well integrated into the research group. In such groups, we find few indications of joint publications and dissertations. Sometimes the Committee even wondered how much time a foreign visitor was actually spending with the research group, because it was clear that some of these visitors had extremely busy schedules at their home universities and at other universities. Overall, the Committee remained very impressed with the international networks that have been developed but recommends that more attention should be given to truly integrating visiting academics into the functioning of the research groups.

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