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.

Monopoly Regulation

Monopoly is usually considered to lead to economic inefficiency. Excessive monopoly profits are commonly regarded as unfair to consumers. Policies for dealing with monopoly range from laissez faire or toleration at one extreme to “trust-busting” at the other. Another possibility is to put monopolistic enterprises under government ownership, as is commonly done in Europe for railroads and telephone service. Regulation of the monopoly’s price and quantity or quality of service by a government agency is important. In the US regulation is standard practice for privately owned ‘public utilities’ providing goods and services such as electric power, water and gas, telephone, and transportation—usually thought to be natural monopolies.

The standard philosophy of regulation aims at limiting the monopolist to a ‘normal profit.’ Normal profit is supposed to be just adequate to attract needed capital and other resources into the business, but not so high as to represent exploitation of consumers. Normal profit in the accounting sense corresponds to zero economic profit. Zero economic profit characterizes long-run equilibrium in perfect competition. In a sense regulation achieves the result that may occur if competition is possible.

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.

Order Cost

Order cost includes all incremental costs associated with placing or receiving an extra order that are incurred regardless of the size of the order. Components of order cost include:

• Buyer time: Buyer time is the incremental time of the buyer placing the extra order. This cost should be included only if the buyer is utilized fully. The incremental cost of getting an idle buyer to place an order is zero and does not add to the order cost. Electronic ordering can significantly reduce the buyer time to place an order by making order placement simpler and in some cases automatic.
• Transportation costs: A fixed transportation cost is often incurred regardless of the size of the order.
• Receiving costs: Some receiving costs are incurred regardless of the size of order. They include any administration work such as purchase order matching and any effort associated with updating inventory records. Receiving costs that are volume dependent should not be included.
• Other costs: Each situation can have costs unique to it that should be considered if they are incurred for each order regardless of the quantity of that order.

The order cost is estimated as the sum of all its component costs. The order cost is often a step function; it is zero when the resource is not fully utilized, but takes on a large value when the resource is fully utilized. At that point the order cost is the cost of the additional resource required.

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.

Postponement

Postponement is the delay to the last possible moment of the final formulation or commitment of a product. The most general method which can be applied in promoting the efficiency of a marketing system is the postponement of differentiation for example, to postpone changes in form and identity to the latest point in the marketing flow or to postpone changes in  inventory location to the latest possible time. Minimization of the risk of speculation is achieved by delaying differentiation of the product to the time of purchase. Savings in transportation of goods are achieved because merchandise is moved in larger quantities, in bulk, or in relatively undifferentiated places.

Postponement is the opposite of speculation. A speculative inventory is put into a distribution center whenever the cost of carrying that inventory is less than the profit derived from having that inventory readily available to stimulate purchases.

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.

Converting Needs to Wants

Every consumer must acquire goods and services on a continuing basis to fill certain needs. Everyone must satisfy the fundamental needs for food, clothing, shelter, and transportation by purchasing things or, in some instances, temporarily using rented property and hired or leased transportation. By focusing on the benefits resulting from these goods and services, effective marketing converts needs to wants. A need for clothing may be translated into a desire (or want)  for designer clothes.

As easier-to-use software has enabled millions of nontechnical consumers to operate personal computers and as falling retail make these computers affordable to most households, computers have become fixtures in many offices and homes.

Companies that adopt the marketing concept focus on providing solutions to consumer problems. They promote product benefits rather than features to show the added value that computers will receive from the product.

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.

 

Production Management

Production is the use of people and machines to convert materials into finished products and supply these products to customers. Production includes three key stages: product development, purchasing, and manufacturing.

The development of a new product involves six steps: idea generation, screening, business analysis, product development, test marketing, and commercialization. Roughly, one in 58 new product ideas becomes a commercial success.

When the product development department designs a new product, a make-buy decision determines which components will be bought from outside suppliers and which will be made by the firm itself.

The six steps in purchasing raw materials and semi-finished and finished parts are 1) recognizing what is needed, 2) developing specifications, 3) requesting bids and selecting a vendor, 4) following up with the vendor, 5) receiving the order, and 6) evaluating the vendor.

Mass production and automation have revolutionized manufacturing methods and have made higher quality, standardized products available at lower prices.

The three classifications of manufacturing operations are standard versus custom manufacture, continuous versus batch process, and analytic versus synthetic process.

Once final products are assembled, the transportation section must ship them to customers on time and in good condition. The managers here use one of the five modes of transportation: highway, rail, air, water, and pipeline. Developments such as piggyback service and containerization allow a business to use two or more transportation modes to move shipment over long distances.

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.

Divulging on Resources

The level of want satisfaction that an economy can achieve is limited partly by the quantities and qualities of its known resources. Resources are the means available for producing goods that are used to satisfy wants. Hundreds of different kinds of resources exist in the economy. Among these are labor of all kinds, raw materials of all kinds, machinery, buildings, semi-finished materials, fuel, power, transportation, and the like.

Resources can be classified conveniently into two categories: a) labor or human resources, and b) capital or nonhuman resources. Labor resources consist of labor power or the capacity for human effort, both of mind and of muscle, used in producing goods. The term capital can be misleading since it is used in several different ways not only by non-economists as well. But here it is used to include all non-human resources that can contribute toward placing goods in the hands of the ultimate consumer. Specific examples are buildings, machinery, land, available mineral resources, raw materials, semi-finished materials, business inventories, and any other non-human tangible items used in the productive process.

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.

Accounting Information

Accurate cost data are required for the successful implementation of the integrated physical distribution management concept using total cost analysis, for the management and control of physical distribution operations, and to aid in setting selling prices and in justifying price differentials.

As the cost of physical distribution increases, the need for accurate accounting for the costs becomes increasingly critical. Since the physical distribution function is relatively more energy intensive and labor intensive than other areas of the firm, its ratio of costs to total company costs has been steadily increasing. Efficient and effective distribution policies cannot be determined until the costs related to separate functional areas and their interaction are made available to distribution decision makers.

The quality of the accounting data will influence management’s ability to exploit new markets, take advantage of innovative transportation systems, make changes in packaging, choose between common carriers and private trucking, increase deliveries or increase inventories, and determine to what extent the order-processing system should be automated.

The accounting system must be capable of providing information to answer the following questions:

a)        What are the impacts of physical distribution costs on contribution by product, by territory, by customer, and by salesperson?

b)        What are the costs associated with providing additional levels of customer service? What trade-offs are necessary and what are the incremental benefits or losses?

c)        What is the optimal amount of inventory? How sensitive is the inventory level to changes in warehousing patterns or to changes in customer service levels? How much does it cost to hold inventory?

d)        What mix of transportation modes and carriers should be used?

e)        How many field warehouses should be used and where should they be located?

f)          How many production set-ups are required? Which plants will be used to produce each product?

g)        To what extent should the order-processing system be automated?

To answer these and other questions requires knowledge of the costs and revenues that will change if the physical distribution system changes. That is, determination of a product’s contribution should be based on how corporate revenues, expenses, and hence profitability would change if the product line were dropped. Any costs or revenues that are unaffected by the decision are irrelevant to the problem. For example, a relevant cost woul be public warehouse handling charges associated with a product’s sales; a non-relevant cost would be the overhead costs associated with the firm’s private trucking fleet.

Implementation of this approach to deceision making is severely hampered by the lack of availability of the right accounting data or the inability to use the data when they are available. The best and most sophisticated models are only as good as the accounting input, and a number of recent studies attest to the gross inadequacies of distribution cost data.

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, Lectures, Line of Sight

Logistics: Currency Rate of Exchange

Variations in the rate of exchange of the dollar against foreign currencies represent a difference of major importance in international logistics just as they do in any other facet of international operations. The design and operation of an international logistic system is based on a set of units of measure. Thus, as rates of exchange vary, so do the local costs associated with different local currencies; these include transportation, warehousing, inventorying, information processing, and other costs elements.

When variations in rates of exchange become substantial in magnitude, and significantly different between countries, it is usually necessary to re-evaluate the structure of the logistic system, to ensure that it is adjusted to keep it close to its optimal performance. By the same token, management reports must provide explicit identification of variations in costs due to variations in currency rates of exchange, as opposed to variations in performance.

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, Line of Sight

Assessing Competitors’ Areas of Strength

1. Excellence in product design and/or performance (engineering ingenuity)
2. Low-cost, high-efficiency operating skill in manufacturing and/or in distribution
3. Leadership in product innovation
4. Efficiency in customer service
5. Personal relationships with customers
6. Efficiency in transportation and logistics
7. Efficiencies in sales promotion
8. Merchandising efficiency—high turnover of inventories and/or of capital
9. Skillful trading in volatile price movement commodities
10. Ability to influence legislation
11. Highly efficient, low-cost facilities
12. Ownership or control of low-cost or service raw materials
13. Control of intermediate distribution or processing units
14. Massive availability of capital
15. Widespread customer acceptance of company brand name (reputation)
16. Product availability, convenience
17. Customer loyalty
18. Dominant market share position
19. Effectiveness of advertising
20. Quality salesforce

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, Line of Sight