Be Inquisitive in Customer Service

Desire quality, efficiency, and precision

• Focus on the customer’s need for accuracy and efficiency by methodically outlining steps, processes, or details related to a product or service.
• Communication should be tied into facts, not feelings.
• Have details and information prepared in advance and be thoroughly familiar with them
• Approach encounters in a direct, businesslike, low-key manner.
• Avoid small talk and speaking about yourself.
• Ask specific open-ended questions about customers’ background or experiences related o the product or service.
• Present solutions in a sequential fashion stressing advantages, value, quality, reliability and price. Also, be prepared to point out and discuss disadvantages.
• Have documentation available to substantiate your claims.
• Don’t pressure customer decisions and follow through on promises.

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

Interacting with People

Direct open communication with others fosters trust, enhances information flow, and builds stronger relationships. Use following guidelines to increase such communication:

• Let people know in a timely way about information that affects them. Respond as quickly as possible to any questions they may have.
• Be aware of the messages you send non-verbally. Communicate a positive, open message to people by facing them and making eye contact (or using other culturally appropriate gestures when in other countries or cultures).
• To help your employees and others develop their skills, convey positive and constructive feedback. Positive feedback lets people know what they are doing correctly and the behavior you appreciate. Constructive feedback informs people of their ineffective behavior and gives them an opportunity to compensate for or improve the behavior.
• If conflicting or mixed messages come up in conversation, confront the discrepancy and work with the other person to clarify the misunderstanding.
• When you receive vague messages, define the issues in concrete terms so that all parties are clear about what is being said.
• When you need to get a point across in a direct, nonaggressive, fashion, simply say what you think and feel without putting the other person down.

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.

Managerial Know-how

People who bring capital, labor, and resources together to fashion them into a productive organization that must face the risks of an uncertain world, occupy strategic positions. Thus, given the same inputs, presumably a country with superior management will do better than one with weak management. The importance of managerial know-how can be illustrated by the airlines industry.

Obviously an explanation of world business involves many elements. But with a basic understanding of the few elements, comparative advantage and specialization.

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.

Imperative Focus

Developing the right working culture and becoming tightly focused should be priority areas for an organization but, in order to make right decisions, there are some things we need to know.

• Do differences in the way organizations are owned influence the way they should be run?
• Where do organizations stand in regard to morality and can an organization be immoral?
• Is the concept of service important to an organization’s success?
• How should we deal with the issue of job-hopping?
• Should we avoid personality cults?
• What happened to good old-fashioned leadership?
• Are the employees revolting?

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.

De-Stress Without Distress

Stress is a significant problem in the workplace and many people are searching for effective antidotes. Unfortunately, most look in the wrong places. The answer is not to follow the crowds who take sedatives or tranquilizers, but to take control. It is for this reason that options to control your symptoms are critical to learn. They include:

1. Relaxation Response
2. Biofeedback
3. Music
4. Art
5. Fashion
6. Acupuncture
7. Positive Imagery
8. Placebos (Latin word = I shall please)
9. Hobbies
10. Humor

All these options are easy to master and free from side effects. They will improve your health today, and may even save your life tomorrow.

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.

Creative Abuse

A tactic involves Candid Camera-like observations of how your product is actually used by the customer. You may have a wonderful product, created for one thing, but it may end up being used for an entirely different purpose.

Some don’t find real product until they understand with little unexpected help that they are selling the right product to the right customers for the wrong purpose. Their products don’t really take off until customers tell that they misuse it as partial substitute.

You can see creative abuse all the time in the world of fashion: women wearing men’s shirts, and men sporting women’s earrings, sport coats made out of heavily starched wallpaper, evening gowns patterned after lingerie.

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.

Managing Inventory

Inventory is an area where financial managers can fine-tune the firm’s cash-flow. Inventory sitting on the shelf represents capital that is tied up without earning interest. Furthermore, the firm incurs expenses for shortage and handling, insurance, and taxes. And there is always a risk that the inventory will become obsolete before it can be converted into finished goods and sold.

The firm’s goal is to maintain enough inventory to fill orders in a timely fashion at the lowest cost. To achieve this goal, the financial manager tries to determine the economic order quantity or quantity of raw materials that, when ordered regularly, results in the lowest ordering and storage costs. The problem is complicated by the fact that minimizing ordering costs tends  to increase storage costs and vice versa. The best way to cut ordering costs is to place one big order for parts and materials once a year, while the best way to cut storage costs is to order small amounts of inventory frequently. The challenge facing the financial manager is to find a compromise that minimizes total costs.

That is why many businesses today are turning to just-in-time inventory control. Businesses—and even divisions within companies—link up through computers with their customers and suppliers, thereby automatically ordering only as much as is necessary for a given period of time.

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.

Boss-centered Leadership

For some leaders, anything goes. The end justifies the means—deceit and manipulation included. This leadership style is known as Machiavellanism, after Niccolo Machiavelli, who set it out in 1532 in his book The Prince. He argued that a leader is justified in using any technique, no matter how deceitful, to manipulate and to control people and to strike down enemies. Researchers have devised various tests to determine the degree to which individuals are “High Machs” (manipulators of other people) or “Low Machs” (not manipulators of other people).

High Machs are coolly aloof. They appraise a situation and other people in a logical and detached fashion rather than emotionally. Apparently this insensitivity permits them to manipulate others while pursuing their own goals.

The Low Mach, the typical “nice guy” who likes and trusts people, is not detached enough to exploit others.

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.

Measuring Productivity

You are likely to be judged – at least to some extent – by your financial performance. But financial measures such as profitability and return on investment are really indirect measures of the operations, good financial performance comes from good operations. You can measure the operations more directly using measures such as productivity, utilization and efficiency.

Productivity is the most common measure of operations. It shows the amount of output that you create for each unit of resource used. You might, for example, measure the number of units made per employee, sales per square meter, or deliveries per vehicle.

Your competitors are always trying to gain an advantage, and an effective way of doing this is by increasing their productivity. You then have to match their improvement simply to stay in business. So the benefits of higher productivity include:

• Long-term survival;
• Lower costs;
• Less waste of resources;
• Higher profits, wages, real income, etc;
• Targets for continually improving operations;
• Comparisons between operations;
• Measures of management competence.

These are good reasons for improving productivity. But how can you do it? At the very worst, you simply make people work harder – problem solved. In reality there are four ways of increasing productivity:

1. Improve effectiveness – with better decisions;
2. Improve efficiency – with a process that gives more output for the same inputs;
3. Improve the process – getting higher quality, fewer accidents, or less disruption;
4. Improve motivation – getting better results from the workforce.

One of the problems with improving productivity is that employees see it as an excuse for sacking them. Productivity is really a measure of improvement performance, and it has very little to do with the old-fashioned idea of getting people to work harder. An enthusiastic person digging a hole with a spade can work very hard, and still be far less productive than a  lazy person with a bulldozer. Typically, 85 percent of productivity is set by the process which is designed by managers and only 15 percent is due to the individual workers.

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.