Global Supply Chain Management – Drivers and Activities of Global Supply Chain

Nowadays with globalization, global supply chain management is becoming a very important issue for most of businesses. The main reasons of this trend are procurement cost reduction, purchasing risks control, revenues increasing and etc. For instance, companies may set up overseas factories to benefit from tariff and trade concessions, lower labor cost, capital subsidies, and reduced logistics costs in foreign markets. Moreover, easy access to abroad markets and close proximity to customers result better organizational learning. On the other hand, improved reliability can be obtained as a consequence of closer relationship with suppliers.

There are some issues that should be considered in managing a global supply chain.… Read the rest

Cost Reduction – Meaning and Techniques

Meaning of  Cost Reduction

A cost reduction program is a type of method which is to improve profitability of the organization or by expected to get a good result that flow to the bottom line of the financial statement and exempted from any serious damage to the organization itself. As this program is much more about reducing cost or reducing expenses of the organization, so a good cost reduction program is all about how to control the damage of an organization. Furthermore, a cost reduction program is said to be improve the profitability of an organization because by reducing expenses, profits are increased without making others changes.… Read the rest

Green and Sustainable Supply Chain Management

Environmental changes across the world have generated a movement to identify the causes of global warming and develop solutions to end it before it is too late. In an effort to achive this, many countries are creating laws and regulations with the specific aim to reduce carbon emissions and greenhouse gas effect.

The truth is that environmental change is upon us. Not only do we have climate problems but we are also dealing with a resource depletion issue. With economies like India and China growing at near double digit rates, the population of the world continues to grow creating shortages of many resources that we use to take for granted.… Read the rest

Kaizen Costing Method

Kaizen is a Japanese management concept launched by Masaaki Imai, which proved to be the key to Japanese competitive success. The significance of this concept is: KAI = Change and ZEN = for better, and the translation is “continuous improvement”, that means small improvements to the ongoing efforts. Unlike the Western conception, implying total change, at large intervals of time, using large amounts of resources and a high cost level, Kaizen Costing seeks daily, gradual, slow, but continuous improvements, which take place at minimal cost.

Kaizen strategy is that a single day should not pass without an improvement to intervene in the activity of each employee or each entity.… Read the rest

Seven Management and Planning Tools

Competition level within every industry is constantly growing and businesses try to find any possible ways to improve quality of products and services. However, quality is quite a complex concept that can be viewed as a measure of perfection. Quality improvement leads to a perfect product that is meant to satisfy the customer. In the early 1980s, the seven management and planning tools were designed as major tools for effective planning and management of processes, which are above the quality operation.

They are as follows:

1. Affinity Diagrams

The first of the tools in the list is Affinity diagrams. The affinity diagram is a visual brainstorming instrument that can be used to categorize various facts and data, ideas and opinions by a proximity factor.… Read the rest

Agile Project Management – Concept and Stages

What is Agile Project Management?

Agile project management has been defined as short cycles of product development that deliver incremental updates of the product rapidly based on the changing needs of the customer. This methodology is the opposite of waterfall project management, which values extensive planning and pre-production.

The agile approach consists of a number of stages including rapid iterative planning and development cycles allowing a project team to constantly evaluate the project and obtain immediate feedback from users or stakeholders allowing the team to learn from their experiences after each cycle. After the streamlined planning requirements, definition and solution design phase is completed to get the project underway iterations or more detailed planning requirements are created.… Read the rest