Understanding your business system can help you become aware of the forces at play, improve your bottom line, improve your products and services and control your costs. Your own business, which forms a part of the wider operating environment, is its own internal system. By looking at your business as a system, you can better understand your capability, your costs, any variations and where you can really add value. It is important to have a good grasp of your support processes and management system and how these impact on your business – or, more simply, how you organize and use your resources to become productive; the stuff that you do to stay in business.