...Making it work How do operational innovation efforts begin if no one is responsible for them and no formal channels for creating programs exist? Most often they start as grassroots movements, fostered by people sprinkled throughout organizations who are passionately committed to finding and exploiting opportunities for operational innovation. These catalysts take it upon themselves to find a leader who can grasp what they have in mind and then spearhead the innovation effort. The executive must have both the imagination and the charisma needed to drive major operational change. Then the catalysts relentlessly campaign for the cause—confronting the executive with the inadequacies of existing operations and arranging for meetings with peers from other companies that have successfully implemented operational innovations. The campaign will be helped immensely if catalysts can tout existing pockets of operational innovation within their own organization. Maybe one plant implemented a new way of scheduling production, or a customer service center used a CRM system in a new way, or a sales team created a new way to support customers. Examples like these will help convince a leader that operational innovation can work. Once the top executive is convinced that operational innovation is worth pursuing, the organization needs to focus its efforts. Because operational innovation is by nature disruptive, it should be concentrated in those activities with the greatest impact on an enterprise's...
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...That Matter: The Most Effective KPIs to Transform Your Business By: Jon Snow, Senior Manager, Business Consulting Services An Epicor® White Paper WHITE PAPER Table of Contents Financial and Transactional KPIs: A KISS Approach Operational Area: Sales Gross Margin Sales per Employee Operational Area: Purchasing Inventory Turns Service Level Operational Area: Fulfillment, Inventory Control or Warehouse Operational Area: Finance DSO (Days Sales Outstanding), Average Collection Period DPO (Days Payables Outstanding), Average Payables Period Cash Conversion Cycle About Epicor 1 3 3 4 5 5 5 6 7 7 7 7 9 Metrics That Matter: The Most Effective KPIs to Transform Your Business i WHITE PAPER Businesses thrive or fail based on their ability to identify, define, track, and act upon Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The faster and more accurately KPIs can be accessed, reviewed, analyzed, and acted upon, the better the chance an organization has for success. Beyond the shareholder value that KPI improvement programs generate, KPI improvement initiatives position organizations for growth, financial performance and service differentiation. Sophisticated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Business Intelligence tools have made it possible to quickly calculate and report Key Performance Indicators and metrics. In previous white papers and articles, Epicor has emphasized the benefits of creating a KPI improvement program, and how that program should resonate with the key...
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...Assignment in Production and Operation Management 1. Production/operations management is the process, which combines and transforms various resources used in the production/operations subsystem of the organization into value added product/services in a controlled manner as per the policies of the organization. Therefore, it is that part of an organization, which is concerned with the transformation of a range of inputs into the required (products/services) having the requisite quality level. Production function is that part of an organization, which is concerned with the transformation of a range of inputs into the required outputs (products) having the requisite quality level. Production is defined as “the step-by-step conversion of one form of material into another form through chemical or mechanical process to create or enhance the utility of the product to the user.” Thus production is a value addition process. At each stage of processing, there will be value addition. 2. Operations Management The study of set of activities comprising supervision, planning and designing of business operations in the field of manufacturing of goods and services is termed as operations management. The purpose of operations management is to make certain that the operations of a business are efficient and effective and result in minimum of wastage. Operations management tries to cut down resources involved in operations while at the same time making operations more effective and productive...
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...Innovation -strategies and finance- Index 1. Introduction 2. Tips for innovation 2.1 Increase Productivity 2.2 Implement a Continuous Improvement Culture 2.3 Create an Innovation Culture 2.4 Developing Talent and Ability to Innovate 2.5 Design and Build New-Growth 2.6 Collaboration 3. Innovation in the EU 3.1 Marco’s Programme. 3.2 Innovation Union 3.2.1 Conclusions innovation unión. 4. Conclusions 5. Biography 2 Introduction Innovation is the development of new customers value through solutions that meet new needs, inarticulate needs, or old customer and market needs in value adding new ways. This is accomplished through more effective products, processes, services, technologies, that are readily available to markets, governments, and society. Innovation differs from invention in that innovation refers to the use of a better and, as a result, novel idea or method, whereas invention refers more directly to the creation of the idea or method itself. Innovation differs from improvement in that innovation refers to the notion of doing something different rather than doing the same thing better. In business and economics, innovation is the catalyst to growth. With rapid advancements in transportation and communications over the past few decades, the old world concepts of factor endowments and comparative advantage which focused on an area’s unique inputs are outmoded for today’s global economy. Economist Joseph Schumpeter, who contributed greatly to the study of innovation...
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...CREATING ORGANIZATIONAL VALUE AND HIGH PERFORMANCE THROUGH INTEGRATED SUSTAINABILITY PROGRAMS AND BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE---A STUDY OF ACCENTURE As companies grapple with the current economic situation, many are recognizing that this particular downturn in the business cycle is different from those that preceded it. Indeed, today’s business context—characterized by rapidly intensifying globalization that has substantially increased the complexity, risk and uncertainty of doing business—has only served to exacerbate the challenge of managing through a difficult economy. Many of today's biggest challenges come down to the different kind of decision making required to be successful. Organizations seeking high performance must make faster and bolder decisions. Companies must think both the positive and negative consequences of decisions made in this fast-paced environment. The systematic study of the organization’s ability to develop and sustain a culture capable of delivering quality products and services over time enables us to identify and understand the general requirements for doing so and provides insight into how to do it. In this paper I will share what I have learned about creating and sustaining an organizational value through integrated sustainability programs and business intelligence that is capable of high performance in Accenture. In a time of changing consumer values and economic uncertainty, the marketing function has a more strategic role to play in driving growth...
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...Gartner Business Process Management Summit 2013 13 – 14 March | London, UK | gartner.com/eu/bpm Aspire, Challenge, Transform: Driving Breakthrough Business Performance TriP rePorT The annual Gartner Business Process Management Summit was held on 13 – 14 March 2013, at the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge. This report summarizes and provides highlights from the event. SAve The DATe The Gartner Business Process Management Summit 2014 will take place on 19 – 20 March in London, UK. We hope to see you again! overview This year’s event was focusing on helping delegates break free from small scale, iterative BPM projects to deliver truly game-changing business transformation. In the opening presentation of the summit, Summit Chair John Dixon invited you to aspire to greater things, to challenge the status quo in your organizations and to transform your organizations using BPM. We carried this theme into our keynotes and track presentations, and we hope it has helped to spark some new ideas that will make a difference to you and your organization. TABle of ConTenTS Park Plaza Westminster Bridge, London, UK Tina Nunno speaking at the Gartner Business Process Management Summit 2013 2 3 5 Key Take-Aways Keynote Sessions Top of Mind Concerns — What Attendees Asked About Top 10 Most-Attended Sessions Attendee Snapshot Top 10 best-rated sessions Sponsors Post Event Resources 5 5 6 7 8 © 2013 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a...
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...capabilities for emerging opportunities Armen Ovanessoff, Mark Purdy Article information: To cite this document: Armen Ovanessoff, Mark Purdy, (2011),"Global competition 2021: key capabilities for emerging opportunities", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 39 Iss: 5 pp. 46 - 55 Permanent link to this document: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/10878571111161525 Downloaded on: 29-03-2012 To copy this document: permissions@emeraldinsight.com This document has been downloaded 954 times. Access to this document was granted through an Emerald subscription provided by Technische Universitaet Hamburg-Harburg For Authors: If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service. Information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Additional help for authors is available for Emerald subscribers. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.com With over forty years' experience, Emerald Group Publishing is a leading independent publisher of global research with impact in business, society, public policy and education. In total, Emerald publishes over 275 journals and more than 130 book series, as well as an extensive range of online products and services. Emerald is both COUNTER 3 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative...
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...Can the Tata group make the leap from global presence to global domination? Has it made the pledge to transform itself? In the second of a 12-part series, Manjari Raman compares the conglomerate with the Korean chaebols and speaks with Harvard Business School Professor Donald Sull on the strategic challenges ahead for one of India's oldest business groups "This year we will also be focusing on expanding our businesses internationally... This is an important new phase in our group's growth plans and I trust you will also fully commit yourselves to achieving success in establishing a strong international presence for the group" -Tata group Chairman Ratan Tata's message to the group on January 1, 2004. It seemed prescient. Here I was, wondering what stopped Indian companies from going global "" and the chairman of one of the country's oldest, most revered business groups was just starting to make a commitment to globalisation. Could it be that no Indian company had become truly global because not one had committed itself wholly, totally, irrevocably to globalisation? One person has the credentials to answer that question: Harvard Business School Professor Donald Sull. His book Revival of the fittest: why good companies go bad and how great managers remake them (Harvard Business School Publishing, 2003) had caused a stir because of its basic premise, "management by commitment". Pertinently, I knew that Sull was also researching what made companies globally competitive...
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...Whether you’re a CFO who needs to control costs, a DevOps who works on optimizing resource allocation, or a CIO who needs a real-time overview of all cloud activity, Cloudyn enables you to take control of your cloud. Control Cloud Costs Companies today need to move fast to remain relevant and competitive. While cloud computing delivers the agility and scalability required for speedy innovation, costs can soar if not managed properly. Cloudyn provides the finance organization with clarity into cloud cost drivers, tools for cost allocation along with recommendations for optimizing spend and increasing ROI. Plan and Monitor Your Cloud CIOs are responsible for making sure that work gets done quickly, securely and cost-effectively. Whether managing a massive map-reduce job or figuring out which customers are the costliest to support, CIOs need answers on how their cloud resources are performing and what the cost impact is. Cloudyn provides the CIO with tools for assessing cloud efficiency based on detailed performance and cost metrics, across all deployments and environments. Optimize Your Cloud DevOps have successfully leveraged cloud computing to increase productivity and dramatically shorten time-to-market. But the ease with which instances and environments are deployed can have very costly side-effects with redundant allocations, completely unused resources and very limited visibility into who is responsible. Cloudyn empowers the DevOps team to securely monitor and optimize...
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...Control is now in the hands of the customer, rather than the bank. Customers are driving new business models. Their use of technology—in addition to changes in social and household dynamics—is driving business transformation. Banks need to react to this new customer-driven environment with innovation in business models, operations and IT. For banks, the value proposition for cloud computing affects the entire business. Cloud technology offers a new model for delivering innovative client experiences, effective collaboration, improved speed to market and increased IT efficiency. Cloud deployments are spreading and the technology is proving to be secure. More businesses are adopting cloud computing. In fact, according to the 2010 IBM CIO study, “Sixty percent of CIOs plan to use Cloud—up from thirty-three percent two years ago.”2 Today, cloud technology is not just a tool being used in IT, but a paradigm shift to an entirely new business model. ●● ●● ●● Changing business models have shifted from productcentric to customer-centric Enhanced regulation increases government oversight and intervention Increasing social and government pressure for financial inclusion To drive growth and innovation in banking, it is increasingly necessary to dramatically leapfrog the competition using IT and business model transformation. Google Wallet, Apple Wallet, PayPal and others are driving billion dollar revenues. However, many of today’s existing bank payment solutions are 30 years old....
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...Strategic Choice and Evaluation Paper STR/581 March 18, 2013 Dr. Robert Rowlett Choosing a sustainable business strategy is not an easy choice but there are companies who have done it and continue to do so. One such company is Amazon.com who first opened their virtual doors in 1994 and “emerged from the dot-com bubble one of the few winners and continued to blaze a trail of impressive growth (from about $4 billion in 2002 to nearly $20 billion in 2008),” (Johnson, 2010.) Companies like Amazon.com survive and thrive because of sound business decisions based upon sound business models. Their business model is based in strong management strategy. In this paper we will explore alternative Generic strategies, value disciplines, and grand strategies for Amazon.com based upon past performance focused on continued success. Generic Strategies “A long-term, or grand strategy must be based on a core idea about how the firm can best compete in the market place. The popular term for this core idea is generic strategy, from a scheme developed by Michael Porter,” (Pearce & Robinson, 2011). Porter believed that the generic strategy should be directly tied to the company’s performance in the marketplace in this way a firm could leverage its strengths and become stronger. Porter suggests that companies will subscribe to one or more of three types of generic strategies: Low-Cost Leadership, Differentiation, and Focus. Amazon.com has enjoyed the success of a focus strategy in the past. This...
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...• Imagine that you are a senior business manager for a U.S.-based multinational company. You have been informed by your supervisor that your Company needs to consider expanding into a new international market to seek new opportunities. To get started, you must decide the following: • Select a publicly-traded Multinational Corporation (MNC) with which you are familiar. • Raython • Raytheon: Aspiring to be the most admired defense and aerospace systems company through our world-class people, innovation and technology • Raytheon Company is a technology and innovation leader specializing in defense, security and civil markets throughout the world. With a history of innovation spanning 91 years, Raytheon provides state-of-the-art electronics, mission systems integration and other capabilities in the areas of sensing; effects; and command, control, communications and intelligence systems; as well as a broad range of mission support services. • When it comes to designing the most effective security solutions possible, Raytheon uses all of the expertise at its disposal. This means harnessing all of its own advanced technological know-how — and partnering with our customers and experienced teammates in the security field. As an integrator, Raytheon employs equipment and software solutions that are best suited to meet our customer’s specific security requirement. We are not tied to equipment from any particular supplier, including ourselves. The integrator’s responsibility — our...
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...know as “ABC” is the application of gathering data and evaluating all of a companies operational and internal finical overhead information so that top managers can make more accurate and strategic informed decisions to better companies. In the early 1980's traditional costing; which a basic form of costing, was choice of preference with many companies, but traditional costing had its major flaws. Traditional techniques would only provide efficiencies to companies with specific and smaller product selections (Coulter). So in the search of a new systems activity based costing was created, it covered everything from operations, marketing, and all the way to research and development on the internal side of a company. Activity-based costing is extremely important to managers in the sense that it only deals with the internal decision making; which is where most managers focus their views, and that is used along side the traditional accounting. Later on I will present a trade publication that deals with a steel manufacturing company and its journey of activity-based costing throughout they past couple decades. Before then you must have a strong grasp on the concepts of activity-based costing and how they work. First I will discuss how Activity-Based Costing works in an manufacturing side of a company. Each and every product along with service is assigned a cost that correspond to each telling managers how much of a certain resource they will use. For example a standard light bulb...
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... 1. Introduction With their practical and organizational experiences, working habits, interpersonal relations and motivation, people influence a company’s business performance and activities. It is very difficult though to measure the influence of knowledge, i. e. to quantify and express it in figures. The thought that knowledge and work, that is the skills of workers in the work process, are the most important factors of development, is widespread. The aim of intellectual capital is to explain the difference be- tween the books and the market value of a company. So, a com- pany’s value can be determined more precisely, and that could be important for...
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...complex than alliances; bilateral relationship doesn’t qualify as network. From left to right: Market: “buy”. Network: jv, licensing, outsourcing, equity share, contractual cooperation, joint R&D. Hierarchy: “make” From left to right: Market: “buy”. Network: jv, licensing, outsourcing, equity share, contractual cooperation, joint R&D. Hierarchy: “make” Types of Networks: X & Y: X: Alliances between partners with complementary skills/strengths “closing the gap”. Y: Alliances between partners with mutually reinforcing resources/skills/competences “critical mass alliance”; by joining forces you reach a critical mass. Horizontal, vertical & lateral cooperation: Horizontal: Companies within the same position of the value chain cooperate (e.g. alliance between airlines) Vertical: companies from different positions within the value chain cooperate (eg. Buyer supplier relationships along the supply chain) Lateral: across industries, different players from different industries. Stable & Dinamic: Stable: platform for cooperation. Dinamic: project-based. Virtual factory: dynamic, order processing. Competition: Networks compete to each other; network is the compeititive Unit. ...
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