Marketing Eras

• Production Era:  Prior to 1925, most firms operating in highly developed economies focused narrowly on production. Manufacturers stressed production of quality products and then looked for people to purchase them.  The production era did not reach its peak until the early part of 20^th century.
• Sales Era: Manufacturers began to increase their emphasis on effective sales forces to find customers for their output. Firms attempted to match their output to the potential number of customers who would want it. Companies with a sales orientation assume that customers will resist purchasing products and services not deemed essential and that the task of personal selling and advertising is to convince them to buy. Although marketing departments began to emerge from shadows of production, finance, and engineering during the sales era, marketing dominated sales and other areas. Selling is thus a component of marketing.
• Marketing: Personal incomes and consumer demand for products and services dropped rapidly thrusting marketing into a more important role. Organizational survival dictated that managers pay close attention to the markets for their goods and services. The trend ended with the outbreak of World War 11, when rationing and shortages of consumer goods became commonplace. The war years created only a pause in an emerging trend in business: a shift in the focus from products and sales to satisfying customer needs.
• Relationship: It emerged during the 90s. Organizations carried the marketing era’s customer orientation one step further by focusing on establishing and maintaining relationships. This effort represented a major shift from the traditional concept of marketing as a simple exchange between buyer and seller. Relationship marketing by contrast, involves long-term, value-added relationships developed over time, strategic alliances and partnerships retailers play major roles in relationship marketing.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Project Implementation

Clarify implementation goals and standards—what is the intended result of the project? How will we know when we have achieved it? To provide direction to the project the goal should be expressed in terms of performance or output. The goal should be specific, realistic, attainable, challenging, consistent with the available resources and the organization’s policies and procedures, measurable and should have a deadline. The implementation standards should address quality, quantity and timing. This should include a set of standards to identify what actions must be taken meet them.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Behavior and Organizational Strategies

A competency model can be an effective way of communicating to the workforce the values of the senior management and what people should focus on their own behavior. For example, a competency-based appraisal system helps to distinguish individuals with the characteristics that are required to build and maintain an organization’s values (teamwork, respect for individual innovation or initiative) from those who do not exhibit the behaviors that will support these values. In this way competency models can translate general messages about needed strategy and culture change into specifics. There are two principles that can be followed:

• Focus on the superior performers without making an assumption.
• Focus on what they do to perform the given role.

Following are various developed models that are used as a basis for selection, training, promotion and other issues related to human resources:

• Job Competence Assessment Method—this is developed using interviews and observations of outstanding and average performers to determine the competencies that differentiate between them in critical incidents.
• Modified Job Competence Assessment Method—this also identifies such behavioral differences, but to reduce costs, interviewees provide a written account of critical incidents.
• Generic Model Overlay Methods—organizations purchase an off-the-shelf generic competency model for a specific role or function.
• Customized Generic Model Methods—organizations use a tentative list of competencies that are identified internally to aid in their selection of a generic model and then validate it with the input of outstanding and average performers.
• Flexible Job Competency Model Methods—this seeks to identify the competencies that will be required to perform effectively under different conditions in the future.
• Systems Method—this demand reflecting on not only what exemplary performers  do now, or what they do overall, but also behaviors that may be important in the future.
• Accelerated Competency Systems Method—this places the focus on the competencies that specifically support the production of output, such as an organization’s products, services or information.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

The Concept Lifecycle

The new products process essentially turns an opportunity (the real start) into a profit flow (the real finish). It begins with something that is not a product (the profit). The product comes from a situation and turns into an end.

What we have, then, is an evolving product, or better, an evolving concept that, at the end, may become a product. There are stages, like individual frames in a movie film:

• Opportunity concept-a company skill or resource, or customer problem.
• Idea concept-the first appearance of an idea.
• Stated concept-a home or technology, plus a clear statement of benefit.
• Tested concept-it has passed an end user concept test; need is confirmed.
• Full screened concept-it passes the test of fit with company situation.
• Protocol concepts-a statement (product definition) of the intended market user.
• Prototype concept-a tentative physical product or system procedure, including features and benefits.
• Batch concept-first full test of fit with manufacturing; it can be made. Specifications are written, exactly what the product is to be, including features, characteristics, and standards.
• Process concept-the full manufacturing process is complete.
• Pilot concept-a supply of the new product, produced in quantity from a pilot production line, enough for field testing with end users.
• Marketed concept-output of the scale-up process either for a market test or full scale launch.
• Successful concept (new product)-it meets the goals set for it at the start of the project.

Some firms have as many as three production models or prototypes. So, the idea that a new product suddenly “emerges” from R&D-like a chicken from an egg-is simply incorrect.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Cost Drivers

Cost Drivers

The concept of cost drivers can be defined in the consumption or expenditure of recourse or the limitations incurred on revenues. They include:

i.            Price

• Amount actually paid
• Price protection

ii.            System & Processes:

• Time
• Overhead

iii.            Inventory

• Carrying costs
• Overstock & dead stock
• Handling costs

iv.            Requirements

• Over-engineered
• Under-engineered

       v.            Operations

• Maintenance costs
• Operating efficiency

     vi.            Revenues

• Downtime
• Improved output

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Quality Function Deployment

Companies have been started because they are able to recognize what a customer needs and wants and they believe that they can satisfy their customers. TQM, a business philosophy, is established to satisfy the customers. One of the features in TQM which helps to focus on customers in quality function deployment> Quality Function Deployment fully concentrates on customer requirements. This helps a company to satisfy customer needs continuously and retain them so that they can survive in the market. The main output to the quality function deployment is customers’ needs and wants.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

National Customer Satisfaction Indexes

Because of the importance of customer satisfaction to firms and overall quality of life, many countries have a national index that measures and tracks customer satisfaction at a macro level. Many public policy makers believe that measures could and should be used as a tools for evaluating the health of the nation’s economy, along with traditional measures of productivity and price. Customer satisfaction indexes begin to get at the quality of economic output, whereas more traditional economic indicators tend to focus only on quality.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Material Requirements Planning (MRP)

A production plan may be broken down into three major parts:

1. The master production schedule (MPS)
2. The material requirements planning system (MRP)
3. The detailed shop schedule.

Each of these three parts is often complex. Remember that the aggregate planning level aggregates both products and resources. MPS and MRP are at the one lower tactical planning level: resources remain aggregated, but products are dealt with at the individual product level. MRP aggregates resources by simply assuming any product can be produced by waiting a given lead time. The detailed shop schedule takes the schedule proposed by MRP and produces from it a more realistic schedule that considers actual machine availability. Customer orders basically drive the MPS, which in turn drives MRP, which orders raw materials and production of various stages and quantities in order to meet demand in a timely fashion.

The control of the production system has three parts, each of which uses as input the output of the previous part:

• Part A—Collect and integrate the information required to develop the master production schedule.
• Part B—Determine the planned order releases using MRP.
• Part C—Determine detailed shop floor schedules and resource requirements.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Behavioral Consequences

From behavior of people within an organization come such important consequences as productivity, satisfaction, and revitalization. Productivity refers to the quality and quantity of products and/or services, i.e., the output (in relation to inputs) that is ostensibly the organization’s logical or formal purpose. Satisfaction refers to the positive feelings of the people in a group about themselves and their situation. How much of what kind of satisfaction are they getting? Revitalization refers to the increased ability to cope with and adapt to changes in both the internal and external environments. For the individual this includes growth, in terms of emotional health or skill or learning of various kinds. For the social system in which individuals behave, it means the capacity to change internally to permit more productivity and/or satisfaction in the long run.

Productivity, satisfaction and revitalization are collectively referred as collectiveness. This term implies that to be effective a system must purchase all three. The complexity imposed by these multiple criteria for effectiveness demolishes any meaningful idea of maximizing effectiveness—at best, an organization can only approach an optimization of these criteria. The components of effectiveness may be viewed from the vantage point of any of the principal entities; namely, the individual, group, and organization. The consequences of behavior may vary by entity and category.

A second major behavioral consequence of importance to small groups is cohesiveness. By cohesiveness  is meant the tightness of the inter-personal bonds that hold a group together. Cohesiveness and effectiveness are essentially different concepts.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

 

Working Culture

A working culture is the way an organization shapes its values, identity, behavior and relationships, in the same way that a social paradigm conditions the character, personality, behavior and attitudes of an individual.

It determines the way an organization interprets everything it sees and touches, the organization’s self-image and branding, and the attitude to its employees, customers, partners, competitors and the society and environment which it operates.

o     Working culture works in a similar way to social paradigms but involves the control of multiple inputs and multiple outputs.

o     It is applicable only in the context of the organization’s specific purpose.

o     It controls the conduct of the organization as a whole and any individual personally representing the organization.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.