Day to Day Management

Advantages of the Blog Feeds

2010-01-24T11:29:00.000-08:00

Now a days blog feeds are very popular and it is another easy way to reach your reads.

Some of the advantages to use the feeds are

Feeds are spam -proof.
Feeds are virus - proof
Feeds are control by readers , it's not line once they subscribe it they have to live with that whole life. At any time reader son;t want any particular feed they can turn it off.
Feed help blogger to improve search engine Ranking .

Happy Customers , But

2010-01-22T23:48:00.000-08:00

It's almost 11:49PM (PST) , was reading something about Happy Customers , so thought of blogging that.

As we all know happy customer are really critical for business after the 2008 meltdown.Satisifying a customer is crucial to a business , and every analysis indicate that their is a link between happy customer and higher profit.But How about the Happy Employess, satisifying employees is worthwhile if you want Happy customer.But Happy employee and Happy customer has not a easy thing to do .

One good thought is give reason to your employee to maintain Happy customer and tell them why happy customer are good for them and business as well as tell them the ways to please the customers, and then acknowledge your employee efforts as well as reward them for same.

Well that's for now.

Critical Thinking in today Market

2010-01-22T23:42:00.000-08:00

While eating lunch on my desk, I thought why to waste time, and start surfing net and found some good article about how to manage work after the 2008 meltdown. (Just a word – it is not a good idea to eat lunch as well as reading something over the net).

Most of the author of the article that I have read authors said with the meltdown of 2008, we really need good leaders who not only for foresee the things, but also who think critically.

A leader lead rest of the team, but with the meltdown of 2008, shall I say our leaders not able to foresee the things and not able to critically analyzed the situations.

One author said that by thinking critically it means

When a proposition is give to a person, he should look and find “What” and “Why” for it.
He/She should be open and look at a situation from different perspective.
He/She should be quick in spotting the potential.
And last but not the least, today we are living in a constantly changing environment, a critically thinker should be capable to work in changing environment, he/she should be comfortable in environment where change is part of the process.

Well that’s for now( let mefinish my sanwitch)

Best Performing CEOs

2010-01-21T14:33:00.000-08:00

Recently I was going through the HBR and found a lovely article on "Best Performing CEOs in the World” and amazed to see how these guys changes their organizations.This blog is just little abstract .Article was written by Morten Hansen. First 5 position occupied by

Steve jobs
Yun Jong-Yong
Alexey B . Miller
John T. Chamber
Mukesh D. Ambani

Top 3 are not even M.BA, and First 2 are leading the IT companies. In top 5 three are leading IT companies and 2 are running the show for Energy companies. As per the analysis by the author, CEO with the M.B.A degree performed better than the CEO with no M.B.A degree (point that he want to make here is that it is wrong to say that business schools had fostered destructive greedy behavior)

Author has not included

Jack Welch
Warren Buffet
Larry Ellision
Bill Gates

Because they want to include the people who has pick the CEO job not before 1995 and not after 2007. As per the article, author and his team analyzed the data of the companies and calculated the daily company returns for the entire length of each CEO tenure, and also calculated the daily returns for the 3 years following a CEO tenure (if applicable). Parameter they use to judge the CEO ranking are -
Country - adjusted company returns
Industry - adjusted company returns
Market capitalization change.
Other Interesting fact about the topics is Insider Vs Outside, Team of analyst who involve in the research found different answer for outsider Vs insider, some says that if a CEO is tapped from the outside he is more open and cable to install changes, but other says that outside are very expensive and for long term growth planning industry/firm specific example are very critical. Symantec CEO John Thompson was considered, as most successful Outsider CEO, where as Samsung and Reliance Industries CEO Yun Jong-Yong and Anil D Ambani was best Inside CEO.

I really like the author work.

What is ERP? What will ERP fix in my business?

2009-05-19T13:47:00.000-07:00

ERP Stands for Enterprise resource Planning system.These systems are comprehensive organizational strategies, implemented at both the technical and operational levels. At its most fundamental level, ERP is a methodology for effectively applying resources—people, processes and technology—to the mission and operational goals of an organization. This methodology encompasses three phases: understanding the goals and strategies of the business; describing how best to implement those objectives; and mapping individual IT projects to the appropriate processes. ERP is not a pure technical undertaking; it integrates business process reengineering (BPR) with proven IT methodologies. The following principles are intrinsic to achieving best business practices through ERP:

A process orientation—Automating workflow ensures that activities are accomplished smoothly and with consistently high quality. This can generate savings in time, money and personnel, and improve the quality of services.

A common data model—To share and utilize meaningful information across an enterprise, data definitions and formats and communications protocols must be standardized. Additionally, a common relational database (RDB) can simplify querying, reporting and data analysis.

Integrated systems development—Systems within an ERP solution must be conversant. Ideally, each module would use the same components; minimally, they must meet the same technical specifications.

A simple architecture—A careful assessment of the existing IT architecture against ERP business requirements will produce many opportunities to reduce costs improve performance and expand services by simplifying the architecture to reduce redundancies and inefficiencies in systems and processes.

The critical components of ERP include:

A strategic plan describing what will be done.

A set of process designs that state how the work will be accomplished.

A set of integrated IT project plans that will support the processes.

A body of standards to which the data, databases, applications, networks and hardware must conform

Management support and human resources education.

What will ERP fix in my business? There are five major reasons why companies undertake ERP. Integrate financial information—As the CEO tries to understand the company's overall performance, he may find many different versions of the truth. Finance has its own set of revenue numbers, sales has another version, and the different business units may each have their own version of how much they contributed to revenues. ERP creates a single version of the truth that cannot be questioned because everyone is using the same system.

Integrate customer order information—ERP systems can become the place where the customer order lives from the time a customer service representative receives it until the loading dock ships the merchandise and finance sends an invoice. By having this information in one software system, rather than scattered among many different systems that can't communicate with one another, companies can keep track of orders more easily, and coordinate manufacturing, inventory and shipping among many different locations at the same time.

Standardize and speed up manufacturing processes—Manufacturing companies—especially those with an appetite for mergers and acquisitions—often find that multiple business units across the company make the same widget using different methods and computer systems. ERP systems come with standard methods for automating some of the steps of a manufacturing process. Standardizing those processes and using a single, integrated computer system can save time, increase productivity and reduce head count.

Reduce inventory—ERP helps the manufacturing process flow more smoothly, and it improves visibility of the order fulfillment process inside the company. That can lead to reduced inventories of the stuff used to make products (work-in-progress inventory), and it can help users better plan deliveries to customers, reducing the finished good inventory at the warehouses and shipping docks. To really improve the flow of your supply chain, you need supply chain software, but ERP helps too.

Standardize HR information—Especially in companies with multiple business units, HR may not have a unified, simple method for tracking employees' time and communicating with them about benefits and services. ERP can fix that.

In the race to fix these problems, companies often lose sight of the fact that ERP packages are nothing more than generic representations of the ways a typical company does business. While most packages are exhaustively comprehensive, each industry has its quirks that make it unique. Most ERP systems were designed to be used by discrete manufacturing companies (that make physical things that can be counted), which immediately left all the process manufacturers (oil, chemical and utility companies that measure their products by flow rather than individual units) out in the cold. Each of these industries has struggled with the different ERP vendors to modify core ERP programs to their needs.
NOTE - For above Blog I collected the information from various site and compiled here.

Why ERP Implementation Fails so often?

2009-05-19T13:41:00.000-07:00

At its simplest level, ERP is a set of best practices for performing different duties in your company, including finance, manufacturing and the warehouse. To get the most from the software, you have to get people inside your company to adopt the work methods outlined in the software.

If the people in the different departments that will use ERP don't agree that the work methods embedded in the software are better than the ones they currently use, they will resist using the software or will want IT to change the software to match the ways they currently do things. This is where ERP projects break down. Political fights break out over how—or even whether—the software will be installed. IT gets bogged down in long, expensive customization efforts to modify the ERP software to fit with powerful business barons' wishes. Customizations make the software more unstable and harder to maintain when it finally does come to life.

The horror stories you hear in the press about ERP can usually be traced to the changes the company made in the core ERP software to fit its own work methods. Because ERP covers so much of what a business does, a failure in the software can bring a company to a halt, literally.

But IT can fix the bugs pretty quickly in most cases, and besides, few big companies can avoid customizing ERP in some fashion—every business is different and is bound to have unique work methods that a vendor cannot account for when developing its software. The mistake companies make is assuming that changing people's habits will be easier than customizing the software. It's not. Getting people inside your company to use the software to improve the ways they do their jobs is by far the harder challenge. If your company is resistant to change, then your ERP project is more likely to fail.