...Beyond Benchmarks: Estimate Your Application Maintenance Costs Using Internal Data by Phil Murphy EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Applications professionals struggle to explain the cost of their applications' ongoing operations and maintenance to their business counterparts, who commonly perceive the costs as excessive. The business perceives these costs as excessive in part because of the way applications professionals deliver the information — as a large and indecipherable lump-sum budget item. Applications professionals who want to avoid blind mandates to cut costs by "X" percent must break out application costs in a way that business people can analyze and digest. When they do, they give the business an opportunity to make smart, surgical reductions to costs and shift underutilized resources to the work that is most important to the organization, increasing overall agility and innovation while reducing wasteful spending habits. IN SEARCH OF "INDUSTRY STANDARD" BENCHMARK COMPARISON FIGURES When business and IT executives push back on the costs of applications, they raise a common set of questions such as, "Are we spending too much?"; "What do other companies spend for the same services?"; and "How do we measure up against 'industry standard' measures and benchmarks?" The erroneous assumption is that "industry standards" exist for virtually every category of IT spending. The term "industry standard" implies that an industry such as manufacturing or insurance agrees to use a certain...
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...1) Financial ratios are of little use without benchmarks to compare them against. Benchmarks are guidelines or general rules of thumb related to a specific industry or business segment. In order for financial operational performance measures to have evaluative meaning, the user must have some reference (comparison) benchmarks against which to compare the actual outcome. As benchmarking and ratio analysis continue to grow in popularity, the availability of such data will also improve. Various public and private organizations collect and analyze financial data on the industry as a whole and on specific sectors. Often this information is available to the general public. Three key financial ratio benchmarks are industry average, historical trend, and budget. A historical performance benchmark is financial data compared to a certain time period with another. The industry average benchmark compares specific firm’s ratios to industry averages which are normally available through a wide variety of industry specific trade journals and associations. This is a good benchmark to see how a firm would be comparing to industry norms. However, as firms diversify operations it can hinder the ability of an analyst to get accurate comparables. Finally, the budget benchmark which is only available to key managerial staff creates the most valid data in any real level or detail. A flexible budget provides the ability for the analyst to get a better understanding of how actual performance...
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...In order to move the corporation towards its strategic goal of “building a profitable franchise by providing relationship banking combined with a high level of service to its customers”, Citi Bank California has recently incorporated a variety of non-financial measurements into its performance evaluation system. Specifically, the problem needs to be addressed in the case is whether James should receive a “below par” or “par” overall rating for the fiscal year 1996 as a result of his “below par” rating in customer satisfaction. My recommendation is to give James a “par” rating, and supporting evidences are given as below. First of all, the newly adopted performance scorecard consists of six different types of measures including financial measures, strategy implementation, customer satisfaction, control measures, people, and standards. Among these measurements, the first four are objective measurements determined by related objective data collected during the year, and the latter two are subjective measurements which are substantially depending on the personal opinions of Lisa, direct supervisor of branch managers including James. According to the four quarterly performance evaluation over the year, James has done an excellent job in five out of six measurements other than customer satisfaction. Therefore, after taking the importance of improving customer satisfaction into account, an overall rating of “par” would be objective enough to highlight the corporation’s strategic goal...
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...INTRODUCTION The recent moves of the government to gradually deregulate the Petroleum, Oil and Lubricants(POL) sector in India as part of the agenda of ‘neo-liberal reform’ has generated discontent among the people. In the run-up to complete deregulation, there are instances of increase in the domestic price of POL products that are proportionately more than the rise in their international prices. In the most recent instance (of 13th September, 2012), the diesel price was raised by Rs.5 per litre at one go, even without any rise in international prices. These steps are being taken to eliminate the government subsidy on these products in a step-by-step manner. Deregulation of the POL sector is bound to eliminate the direct or indirect subsidies completely. And reduction in subsidy, according to the government, is the need of the hour in order to reduce the fiscal deficit as proportion to GDP. Deregulation is also necessitated in the current neo-liberal environment because if the government keeps subsidizing the public sector owned oil marketing companies (OMCs) like Indian Oil, Hindustan Petroleum and Bharat Petroleum, then the private companies like Reliance and others would not get a ‘level playing field’ and they would not be able to compete in price. In this way, the present subsidy regime indirectly restricts the private players from entering the oil marketing sector. Hence, if the priorities of the government in power are the reduction of subsidies and ensuring...
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...Definition of Benchmarking. Benchmarking is simply the comparison of one organization's practices and performance against those of others. It seeks to identify standards, or "best practices," to apply in measuring and improving performance. It is the process of comparing one's business processes and performance metrics to industry bests or best practices from other industries. Dimensions typically measured are quality, time and cost. In the process of best practice benchmarking, management identifies the best firms in their industry, or in another industry where similar processes exist, and compares the results and processes of those studied (the "targets") to one's own results and processes. In this way, they learn how well the targets perform and, more importantly, the business processes that explain why these firms are successful. Benchmarking is used to measure performance using a specific indicator (cost per unit of measure, productivity per unit of measure, cycle time of x per unit of measure or defects per unit of measure) resulting in a metric of performance that is then compared to others. Also referred to as "best practice benchmarking" or "process benchmarking", this process is used in management and particularly strategic management, in which organizations evaluate various aspects of their processes in relation to best practice companies' processes, usually within a peer group defined for the purposes of comparison. This then allows organizations to develop plans...
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...An Anatomy of the Crude Oil Pricing System Bassam Fattouh1 WPM 40 January 2011 1 Bassam Fattouh is the Director of the Oil and Middle East Programme at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies; Research Fellow at St Antony‟s College, Oxford University; and Professor of Finance and Management at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. I would like to express my gratitude to Argus for supplying me with much of the data that underlie this research. I would also like to thank Platts for providing me with the data for Figure 21 and CME Group for providing me with the data for Figure 13. The paper has benefited greatly from the helpful comments of Robert Mabro and Christopher Allsopp and many commentators who preferred to remain anonymous but whose comments provided a major source of information for this study. The paper also benefited from the comments received in seminars at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, UK, ENI, Milan and Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, Oxford. Finally, I would like to thank those individuals who have given their time for face-to-face and/or phone interviews and have been willing to share their views and expertise. Any remaining errors are my own. 1 The contents of this paper are the authors’ sole responsibility. They do not necessarily represent the views of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies or any of its members. Copyright © 2011 Oxford Institute for Energy Studies (Registered Charity, No. 286084) ...
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...PROJ 410 Week 6 DQ 2 To Buy This material Click below link http://www.uoptutors.com/proj-410/proj-410-week-6-dq-2 There are several ways to benchmark. The two most common benchmarking tools are performance benchmarking and best-practice benchmarking. Consider a nationwide bank that has contracted with a seller to assess its current staffing and facility locations. The goal of the contract is for the seller to produce a strategic plan that creates cost efficiencies for the bank by recommending (and implementing) areas to consolidate among staff and facilities. (One recommendation may be to close down a bank branch that is located within three miles of another bank branch.) This is a long-term contract stretched out over five years. If you were the project manager in the bank, to what benchmarks would you compare your seller? Are they performance benchmarks or best-practice benchmarks? Benchmarking is a term that has often been used to represent “the best of the class” performance. Your text implies a slightly less “perfectionist” performance threshold, whereby you assess the performance measures for other similar vendors or services relative to your BPO services, and use these samplings to define performance measures for your project/contract. Which of these two inferences do you feel is more appropriate for supporting the development of performance measures? State your arguments in support of your selection. Is it realistic to use a “perfectionistic” metric for benchmarking...
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...In the article "Customer Driven Benchmarking" by the authors spoke about customer driven benchmarking and the importance of it to the success of businesses. Companies can identify the standards that they need to set with their products & services to ensure that they are at least keeping up with the Joneses of their competition. The author's goal in this article was to see exactly how customer driven benchmarking will lead to the success of companies and the methods that companies can use to achieve this benchmarking. The way that they analyzed this information was by doing extensive research on information that was already provided by previous scholars. The authors then decided to look into customers that were already existing and experienced to evaluate what they seen as the basis for a certain type of product or service. The reason the authors chose to use experience customers is because of the value that experience customers give to a company. The fact that they have shop with the company or brand for as long as they have means that they have extensive knowledge and experience with the products that those companies offers therefore becoming a mouthpiece for the company if they are satisfied. The article says that these customers will give knowledge to new customers about the products and also recommend them to different products that they frequently use themselves. These customers also know what they want in the products that these companies use. They know their choice of...
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...Chapter 8 Job Evaluation 1. What is meant by internal equity? What is the relationship between internal equity and job evaluation? “Internal equity is a situation that results when people feel that performance fairly determines the pay for each individual with a certain job or that relative difficulty results in appropriate differences in pay rates between jobs. Worker dissatisfaction may arise when internal equity principles aren't met.Internal equity studies analyze the nature of a particular position including: 1.Skill2.Effort and 3.Responsibility” (web). 2. What is a benchmark or key job? Why are these kinds of jobs so critical in various job evaluation methodologies? Bench mark jobs are highly visible jobs that common to a variety of organizations. These jobs are critical in various job evaluation methodologies because they can be used for comparison with other jobs that are above, below, or comparable in complexity and difficulty for pay purposes. This is usually a job that is clearly defined and shows the differences between departments. Working in retail I observed different departments such as clothing and appliances. Working in the education filed I observed different “departments” such as special education, speech, dual language as well as mainstream classes. (pg174). 3. What are some of the strengths and limitations in the use of ranking for job evaluation purposes? Some of the strengths of job ranking is when evaluators are intimately...
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...CS 507 Adv. Computer Architecture Home Assignment No. : 1 Due Date : March 12, 2014 Q. No. 1 (40) SPEC CPU2006 provides benchmark suites to evaluate CPU performance. CINT2006 lists the benchmark programs to evaluate performance of CPU for integer performance. It is desired that you evaluate comparative performance of the CPU of your laptop with that of your friends. You may select two or more programs from CINT2006 and execute them on your own machine and that of your friends either with or without any modification to programs selected by you. You need to measure user and system times for each program executed for machines used for comparison. You are required to submit a report containing configuration of m/c.s, CPU details, OS and compiler details, source listing of programs executed, details of modifications in programs, if any, and performance. In case you are not able to run programs from CINT2006, you may select appropriate toy benchmark programs. Q. No. 2 (20) Amdahl’s law states the law of diminishing returns. Demonstrate this though a graph between overall speedup and enhancement made. Q. No. 3 (20) Write a report providing growth of DRAM in terms of priceperformance in the current decade. Please do list sources from where you have collected your data. Q. No. 4 (20) We wish to evaluate core utilization of your laptop processor for a set of programs for different application. Programs may include matrix multiplication, counting of vowels, or displaying certain...
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...components. Then we use these transitory and permanent components to develop forecasting models. We assess our models’ performance in various aspects, and our main results indicate: (a) for real BCNE prices, most of the short-run variation is attributed to demand shocks, (b) the world economic activity and real U.S. dollar effective exchange rate explain much of the cyclical variation of real BCNE prices, (c) real crude oil prices have two structural breaks over the sample period, and their link with the world economic activity is strongest in the most recent regime, (d) real prices of other energy components are highly correlated with the U.S. economic activity, and they are co-integrated with real crude oil prices, (e) our models outperform benchmark models, namely a VAR model, autoregressive (AR) model and a random walk (RW) model, in terms of out-of-sample forecasting, and (f) a 1% positive shock to world economic activity leads to an approximate 7.2% peak response of world commodity...
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...exporter and Southeast Asia's second largest energy producer behind Indonesia, Malaysia is the country most threatened by falling energy prices. In 2013, Malaysia exported the equivalent of 73 percent of its GDP, of which 22 percent came from exports of natural gas (9 percent), refined oil products (8 percent) and crude oil (5 percent). As of November 2014, Malaysian energy export revenues were marginally growing compared with the year before. Income from overseas crude sales rose 8.2 percent year-on-year, but revenue from natural gas and refined products exports grew by only 1.9 and 0.8 percent respectively. Although numbers are not in yet, revenues likely fell sharply in December and have continued to slide into January and February as benchmark oil prices dipped under $50 per barrel. Reduced export revenues will not be the only place Malaysia will feel the effects of falling oil prices. In 2013, the latest year with full data available, oil-related income accounted for 29.5 percent of total government revenue, but only about 55 percent of that income came from taxes and export duties on domestic production. The remainder took the form of "dividends" from state-owned energy firm Petronas, which runs extensive international upstream and midstream operations in addition to its domestic functions, directly exposing it to fluctuations in global oil prices. On Dec. 2, Petronas announced it would reduce its total payments to the government by $11.8 billion in 2015, down from $17.3...
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...Causes of Erratic Oil Price Fluctuations on a Global Scale Crude oil is a significant commodity that has a far-reaching global economic impact. This is mostly because it is used as a primary raw product for extracting various forms of energy, such as diesel, petrol, and kerosene. The products extracted from crude oil are used in the various facets of human life. For instance, diesel is a crucial component used in manufacturing facilities (Mankiw 115-133). There are constant fluctuations in oil prices, making the price of a barrel of crude oil vary on a minute-by-minute scale. Fluctuations in fuel prices can be a primary factor in the cost of transportation and manufacturing to name but a few. Therefore, fluctuations in the price of crude oil have constant effects on the global economy. These effects have made many investors and citizens alike to be wary of any fluctuations (Butcher 45-77). Oil price fluctuations are bad for the global economy. High crude oil prices contribute to a higher cost of living, thereby affecting national and global economic performance. The question then begs; what is the cause of the erratic crude oil price fluctuations in global scale? There are various reasons as to why there are frequent fluctuations in crude oil prices. In particular, just crude oil production itself can cause major fluctuations in crude oil prices. For instance, reduced production would create shortage of crude oil in the market, and following microeconomics principles;...
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...Has Asian Industrialization had a Negative Impact on the Global Marketplace? An Investigation into the Effect of Industrialization of Select Markets and their Impact on the Global Marketplace. Has Asian Industrialization had a Negative Impact on the Global Marketplace? The global marketplace has seen a large shift in buying power in recent years. Former world leaders have seen their influence on the marketplace dwindle as industrialization begins to take hold in countries previously not seen as traditional powerhouses. Worldwide, prices have risen at a rate never before seen. With a burgeoning population of middle class workers, Asia as a whole, and China and India specifically, have fueled this pricing explosion. Research shows that the development of these former 3rd world countries is responsible for a large increase in global pricing due to the high demand for steel, oil, and agricultural products. One major industry which has been affected by this shift is the steel industry. The demand for steel along with the decreased supply has caused prices to increase by 25 to 45 percent in the US market. (Van Der Schans, 2007). Several factors have coincided to deal a damaging blow to the US steel market. Firstly, China and India have become major players in the steel industry, accounting for the consumption of over 25 percent of the worldwide steel supply. Cooney found that, “China has become both the world’s largest steelmaker and steel consumer.” (2006). China’s...
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...Tracee Finley Business Economics GM 545 Spring Semester 2012 Tfinley73@yahoo.com Everyone’s Gasoline Problem Since September 2010, average monthly gas prices have risen 45 cents to $3.21 (February month-to-date), an increase of 16.4%. But during the past four years, there have been several periods where gas prices increased by even more substantial amounts. In 2008, gas prices rose 94 cents — or 33.4% — to $4.11 between February 2008 and June 2008. Gas prices also increased 63 cents from February to May 2006, 86 cents from February to May 2007, and 94 cents from December 2008 to June 2009. (http://www.edmunds.com/about/press/current-gas-price-hikes-dont-measure-up-to-recent-history-says-edmundscom.html). Prices fluctuate at the pump because of problems in the Middle East, natural disasters and government regulation. Crude oil also plays an important role in gas prices. Crude oil is a natural substance found underground that is used to produce fuel for cars, trucks, airplanes, boats and trains. As of February 2012, crude oil prices made up 72% of the price of gasoline. (http://useconomy.about.com). For every $1 increase in the price of a barrel of crude oil, U.S. consumers are likely to pay 2-1/2 more cents for a gallon of gasoline. The prices that we pay at the pump are determined by supply and demand. For example, if demand rises and supply falls, prices increase, and just the opposite when supply increases and demand decreases, prices will decrease. Being an...
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