Case Study on Information Systems: Brown and Gordon Auto parts

Brown and Gordon Auto parts (B&G) is the third largest auto parts manufacturer in the world. It is an autonomously run division of a large conglomerate, RST, Inc. Their head quarters and principal manufacturing facilities are in Cleveland, Ohio, but they operate plant in East Chicago, Illinois, Indianapolis, Indiana, Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio, and South Bend, Indiana. Total annual revenues are close to $2 billion, but profits were reduced dramatically in 1989 and 1990 because of the recession and particularly because of the decline in automobile sales. Plant capacity has dropped to 60%, with a slight pickup in the fourth quarter of this year. (RST, Inc. has turned in record profits in the same two years, with all divisions save B&G performing beyond plan) Most of B&G’s management teams are on-line managers who have proven themselves in operational jobs and have worked their way up in hierarchy. They don’t believe Continue reading

What is Web Mining?

Web Mining is the technique which is used to extract and discover the information from web documents and services automatically. The interest of various research communities, tremendous growth of information resources on Web and recent interest in e-commerce has made this area of research very huge. Web mining can be usually decomposed into subtasks. Resource finding: fetching intended web documents. Information selection and pre-processing: selecting and preprocessing specific information from fetched web resources automatically. Generalization: automatically discovers general patterns at individual and across multiple website Analysis: validation and explanation of mined patterns. Web Mining can be mainly categorized into three areas of interest based on which part of Web needs to be mined: Web Content Mining, Web Structure Mining and Web Usage Mining. Web Contents Mining describes the discovery of useful information from the web contents, data and documents. In past the internet consisted of only different types of services Continue reading

Importance of Change in an Organization

One can try to predict the future. However, predictions produce at best a  blurred picture of what might be, not a blueprint of future events or  circumstances. The effective and progressive management of change can assist  in shaping a future which may better serve the enterprise’s survival prospects.  Change will not disappear or dissipate. Technology, civilizations and creative  thought will maintain their ever accelerating drive on-wards. Managers, and the  enterprises they serve, be they public or private, service or manufacturing, will  continue to be judged upon their ability to effectively and efficiently manage  change. Unfortunately for the managers of the early twenty-first century, their  ability to handle complex change situations will be judged over ever decreasing  time scales. The pace of change has increased dramatically; mankind wandered  the planet on foot for centuries before the invention of the wheel and its  subsequent “technological convergence” with the ox and horse. In Continue reading

Experience Curve

Experience curve is the systematic reductions in the production costs that occur over life of a product. There is a relationship between the scale of production and the size of the unit cost of the product, known as the effect of experience. Graphical representation of experience effect (created on the basis of cumulative production and average cost) is called experience curve. A number of studies show that a product’s production costs decline by some characteristics about each time accumulated output doubles. E.g. in aircraft industry, where each time accumulated output f airframes was doubled, unit costs typically declined to 80 percent of their previous level. That is the production costs of the fourth airframe would be 80 percent less of the production costs for the second airframe, the eighth airframe’s production costs is 80 percent less of he fourth’s, the sixteenth’s airframe costs is 80 percent less of the eighth’s Continue reading

India and Capital Account Convertibility: Some Facts

Whatever the apparent theoretical benefits of capital account convertibility, they have not yet been vindicated by the actual empirical evidence; rather, the experience of the countries in the developing world that have experimented with capital account convertibility has been that of increased market volatility and financial crises. Moreover, at least a part of the large inflows of capital into India are a consequence of the recessionary conditions elsewhere. The country’s macroeconomic fundamentals, though better than before, are not good enough to warrant long-lasting confidence from foreign investors. The reform process is not proceeding with adequate speed, banks are saddled with large volumes of non-performing assets, the financial system is not deep or liquid enough and the country ranks high in the list of corrupt nations. Once the conditions in the rest of the world improve, and the interest rate differentials between India and the rest of the world narrow further, Continue reading

Campaign Management Process

The very concept of a campaign in marketing is focused on a time bound effort to design a strategy for various objectives as per the client requirements. The business objectives which can be the drivers for a campaign are considering an effective launch for a range of products, follow-up and may be increase market share sometimes. The process of campaign management involves an understanding of what are the expected benefits of the campaign, budgeting and costing of the campaign while ensuring that all needful resources are met and finally evaluating the effect of the campaign on the target market. There could be various kinds of campaigns and depending on the objectives of the campaign the basic principle can vary while some core processes remain the same. Some campaigns perform more than one of the functions which may include product launch in the first stage and then go on to brand Continue reading