Operating Leverage

It is a financial thought quite similar to break-even analysis. Both fixed and variable costs are used in the production and marketing of products. The higher the operating leverage, the faster the speed of increase of total profits after the sales crosses the break-even volume. Likewise, those firms with high operational leverage will suffer losses at a faster rate after the sales volume drops under the break-even point.

Organizations with high operating leverage gain more from sales from organizations that have low operating leverage. Organizations with high operating leverage are more responsive to drop in sales volume, losses will occur at a faster speed.

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 Insulation and Business Storms

Many companies are facing storms because they still have not learned the lesson. For these slow learners quality is regarded as something they can add to a badly designed, poorly made product to help hold it together until the buyer gets its home. However the key to survival in today’s competitive climate is real quality through every step of production and service. It is essential to the work by the lowest paid individual on the payroll or the chairman of the board. Without quality, things don’t get sent out properly or on time, and huge service departments are working flat out to repair flaws that should never have been allowed into the products in the first place.

 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.

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.

Factors of Production

Each business has its own mix of the four factors of production, vis-à-vis, natural resources, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship.

Natural resources refers to everything useful in its natural state as a productive input including agricultural land, building sites, forests, mineral deposits, and so on. Natural resources are basic resources required in any economic system.

Labor is critically important. It refers to everyone who works for a business, from the company president to the production manager, the sales representative, and the assembly line worker.

Capital is defined as the funds necessary to finance the operation of a business. These funds can be provided in the form of investments, profits, or loans. They are used to build factories, buy raw materials, hire workers, and so on.

Entrepreneurship is the taking of risks to set up and run a business. The entrepreneur is the risk taker in private enterprise system. In some situations the entrepreneur actively manages the business; in others this duty is handed over to a salaried manager.

All four factors of production must receive a financial return if they are to be used in a private enterprise system. These payments are in the form of rent, wages, interest, and profit. The specific factor payment received varies among industries, but all factors of production are required in some degree for all businesses.

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.

Strategic Marketing & Budgeting

A phase in the strategic marketing management process is budgeting. A budget is a formal, quantitative  expression of an organization’s planning and strategy initiatives expressed in financial terms. A well-prepared budget meshes and balances an organization’s financial, production, and marketing resources so that overall organizational goals or objectives are attained.

An organization’s master budget consists of two parts: 1) an operating budget, and 2) a financial budget. The operating budget focuses on an organization’s income statement. Since the operating budget projects future revenue and expenses, it is sometimes referred to as a pro forma income statement or profit plan. The financial budget focuses on the effect that the operating budget and other initiatives (such as capital expenditures) will have on the organization’s cash position.

In addition to the operating and financial budget, many organizations prepare supplemental special budgets, such as an advertising and sales budget, and related reports tied to the master budget. Budgeting is more than an accounting function. It is an essential element of strategic marketing management.

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.

Macro-Marketing System

A macro-marketing system delivers goods and services to consumers. It also allows mass production with its economies of scale. Also mass communication and mass transportation allow products to be shipped where they’re needed. In addition to making mass production possible, a marketing directed, macro-marketing system encourages innovation—the development and spread of new ideas and products. Competition for consumers’ money forces firms to think of new and better ways of satisfying consumer needs. Marketing activity is especially open to criticism because it is the part of business most visible to the public.

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.

Components of a Business Plan

Business plan tells a very special story. It is the story of a unique business enterprise, the one you, the entrepreneur, will create. Telling this story will reveal how knowledgeable and competent you are, how certain the outcome is, and how desirable it is to proceed with the project.

There are similarities among all good business plans, but no two are exactly alike, because no two businesses are exactly alike, even if they make and sell same thing to the same market, two businesses will have different personalities. The behavior and attitudes of the managers will be reflected in the businesses. Even the décor will be different, just as the homes of the managers will reflect their individual taste and style. Each business plan is unique.

Several topics that deserve consideration in the plan: what, how, where, and when. You would expect to see topic headings like the following:

1. The Product. What product or service is being offered? How is it made ready for sale?
2. Target market. Who will part with their money? How many of them are there? Where are they?
3. Competition. Where do the customers obtain the product or service now? How does that product or service differ from yours? How strong is the competition?
4. Marketing. How will the customers learn about your product? Where can they buy it? How does it get to where they buy it?
5. Management. Who will coordinate the activities of production, administration, and marketing? Who will decide what is to be done and when?
6. Financial Performance? How much profit will be made and when? How much capital is required? What will the business’s net worth be a year from now? Two years from now?

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 Contemporary World

By the end of World War 11 in 1945, the Industrial Revolution was complete. The need for war goods required the development of new forms of production and technology, which later were used to produce consumer goods. Inventiveness was at high peak. Synthetic plastics and chemicals replaced natural substances as the basis for many products. Better machinery made it possible to manufacture products to produce precise specifications. (This type of precision is what lead eventually to the Apollo moon shot, which required components that were accurate to several one-hundred thousandths of an inch.)

In the 1970s, widespread use of computers enabled the management to process large quantities of data. Factories could be automated, with computer-controlled machinery carrying out many routine activities that could previously be completed only by time-consuming human labor.

By 1980, more than 80 percent of US 500 largest businesses were multinational, operating facilities in five or more foreign countries. And even for smaller companies and individual consumers, the world has become more like a large neighborhood than a huge, unknowable planet. High-speed computers, orbiting satellites, fluctuating exchange rates, and worldwide scarcities of natural resources bind us together with common needs, concerns, and goals.

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.