An Analysis of Decision Making Process in Organizations

In today’s business world, the main task of any manager is to take decision; these decisions are impacting the firm, the employees and the environment. As the world is developing and transitioning into a globalized unit, decision making is becoming a complicated task. Manager takes thunders of decisions every day, some decisions are done consciously and other are done subconsciously. More the manager has experiences, more often he will take subconscious decision for recurrent problem, due to it knowledge of the firm, the environments and it past experiences. Other decisions that are not as usual, need to be analyzed on every angle, before being able to build solutions for it, this would be a conscious decision. Decision making is defined as the process of deciding about something important, especially in a group of people or in organization. Decision-making is a six steps processes, no matter if the decision is taken Continue reading

Different Information Systems in Business

Information systems refer to the way in which information is gathered, customized, analyzed, shared and reported. Each information systems are invented to support these requirements of business to enable managers to take sound decisions to achieve business objectives and goals.   They often  overlaps each other with respect to functions they provide like gathering, comparing, analyzing, integrating different software applications and reporting. Each kind of information system supports this by varying degree of effectiveness. They all require costs, time, training to use hardware/software and changes to be adopted, to implement the system. 1. Executive Information Systems (EIS) Executive information system supports the top level management in taking strategic business decisions by providing information to executives. Executives can directly extract information from database of the EIS without any need to being reported. It gathers both internal and external information to support executives in achieving strategic objectives and goals. The features of Continue reading

Sentiment Analysis (Opinion Mining) – An Overview

With the proliferation of opinionated content on the web, this particular application of natural language processing – Sentiment Analysis (Opinion Mining) is used to determine the sentiment of the given speech or text is gaining more popularity. In layman’s term sentiment analysis aims at identifying and classifying spoken words or written text as positive, negative or neutral. What is Sentiment Analysis? In the field of Natural language processing, sentiment analysis also known as opinion mining is task of classifying a given text as positive, negative or neutral based on the opinion or subjectivity of the text. Sentiment analysis can be considered a sub filed of text classification which involves classifying a text in to predefined categories. Sentiment analysis can be used to evaluate the attitude of the people about a topic, comments of Facebook posts, tweets, product review, political agenda, review sites, etc. Once important characteristics of sentiments and opinions Continue reading

History and Background of Starbucks

Starbucks Corporation is an international coffee and coffee house chain based in Seattle, Washington, United States. It opened as a single small store opened in 1971 and became a coffee giant at the end of the millennium. Starbucks has led a coffee revolution in the United States and beyond. The store was opened by 3 men: Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl and Gordon Browker. Starbucks for first nine months bought coffee from Peet’s Coffee. Within first decade Starbucks opened five stores. In 1983, Starbucks bought Peet’s Coffee the same year, Howard Schultz who was hired in 1982 to manage the company’s retail sales and marketing, took a buying trip to Italy, where another coffee revelation took place. He visited Milan’s famous espresso bars and captivated by the culture of coffee and the romance of Italian coffee bars. He returned home determined to bring that type of culture to the United States Continue reading

Meaning of Capital Structure

Capital structure refers to the portfolio of different sources of capital employed by a business. It is the mix of capital. It is the portfolio of liabilities of business. It is the structure of long term liabilities of a business. Short term liabilities being fluctuating type, for structure analysis, which is some what long term in nature, are not considered for capital structure analysis. There is another concept viz., financial structure which studies the structure of whole of the liabilities of business including both short term and long term capital. In final analysis, capital structure analysis is considered with the equity and debt composition of capital of a business. The capital structure for a business should be planned. The debt-equity proposition, mix of equity sources, mix of debt sources and the like need to be planned. To plan capital structure, therefore, means determining the debt-equity proportion and mix of individual Continue reading

Price Component of the Global Marketing Mix

In any country, three basic factors determine the boundaries within which market prices should be set. The first is product cost, which establishes a price floor, or minimum price. While it is certainly possible to price a product below the cost boundary, few firms can afford to do this for extended periods of time. Second, competitive prices for comparable products create a price ceiling or upper boundary. International competition almost always puts pressure on the prices of domestic companies. A widespread effect of international trade is to lower prices. Indeed, one of the major arguments favoring international business is the favorable impact of international competition upon national price levels and, in turn, upon a country’s rate of inflation. Between the lower and upper boundaries for every product there is an optimum price, which is a function of the demand for the product as determined by the willingness and ability of Continue reading