Case Study on Entrepreneurship: Larry Page

Business Analysis

The Boundaryless Career: Modern Contemperory Perspective on Career

Human Resource Management

Concepts of Throughput Accounting and Theory of Constraints

Financial Management

Kaizen – Understanding the Japanese Business Philosophy of Continuous Improvement

Operations Management

Role of Leaders in Shaping Organizational Culture

Management Principles

The Five Stages of Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence  is the process of transforming related business data into information, information into knowledge and with repetitive identification turning knowledge into Intelligence. Data: It is a raw data i.e. it represents reality, facts and figures. Information: It is a data that is processed and interpreted. Knowledge: After the information is processed, it becomes more sensible containing some meaning and understanding. Business Intelligence (BI) is a wide category of applications and technologies for collecting, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help the enterprise users make better decision making. BI applications supports the activities decision support systems, querying and reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical data analysis, forecasting and data mining. Some important definitions of  Business Intelligence are: Business Intelligence is a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information used to enable more effective strategic, tactical, and operational insights and Continue reading

Abey Francis

Selection of the Target Firm and it’s Valuing in Acquisitions

Once a firm has an acquisition motive, there are two key questions that need to be answered. The first relates to how to best identify a potential target firm for an acquisition, given the motives. The second is the more concrete question of how to value a target firm. Choosing a Target Firm Once a firm has identified the reason for its acquisition program, it has to find the appropriate target firm. If the motive for acquisitions is under valuation, the target firm must be under valued. How such a firm will be identified depends upon the valuation approach and model used. With relative valuation, an under valued stock is one that trades at a multiple (of earnings, book value or sales) well below that of the rest of the industry, after controlling for significant differences on fundamentals. Thus, a bank with a price to book value ratio of 1.2 Continue reading

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Postponement Strategy in Supply Chain Management

Postponement is first implemented in manufacturing processes to reduce cost of inventory and improve service level within the company while the product variety increases. The concept of postponement is to delay the change in form, identity and place to the latest possible point until customer commitments have been obtained. It is by exploiting the commonality between items and by designing the production and distribution process so as to delay the point of differentiation. Postponement is closely intertwined with modularization where products in a certain product family are designed where all of them consist of different standardized units. With modularization, combination of different standardized sub-components allows the producing of different end products. The form, function and place of the product are altered and is in contra with the push systems in which goods are manufactured entirely in anticipation of future customer orders and stored downstream without customer’s formulated specifications. Postponement is Continue reading

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Channel Strategy Formulation in Industrial Marketing

Formulating the channel strategy  in industrial marketing involves an analysis of conditions  which have a bearing on the best choice among structural alternatives and on the  relationship between them and the manufacturer which will be most productive.  In general, the industrial marketer has a choice of three types of  structural arrangements. Direct to users – through the manufacturers own sales force, with or  without a network of branch warehouses. Indirect to users – through agents or wholesale distributors. The choice  of an indirect channel system involves the choice of a selective (only one or a  few outlets in each market area) or intensive (a number of outlets in each market  area) relationship. Mixed structure – the nature of the structural network differs with the  segmentation of the market. One segment may buy the manufacturer’s product  in standard grades, while another may want special quality variations. While  indirect distribution may be Continue reading

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Economic Performance Reports in Business

Reports on the economic performance of business units are quite different. Management reports are prepared monthly or quarterly, whereas economic performance reports are prepared at irregular intervals usually once every several years. For reasons stated earlier, management reports tend to use historical information actual costs incurred, whereas economic reports use quite different information. In this section we discuss the purpose and nature of the economic information. Economic reports are a diagnostic instrument. They indicate whether the current strategies of the business unit are satisfactory and, if not, whether a decision should be made to do something about the business unit- expand it, shrink it, change its direction, or sell it. The economic analysis of an individual business unit may reveal that current plans for new products, new plant and equipment, or other new strategies, when considered as a whole, will not produce a satisfactory future profit, even though, separately each Continue reading

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Power Equations of Distribution Channels

The use of power by individual channel member to affect the decision making or the behavior of other is the mechanism by which congruent and effective roles become specified, roles become realigned, when necessary and appropriate role performance is enforced. There are a number of power equations that may be available to one channel member in his attempt to influence the other and vice versa. 1.   Reward power 2.   Coercive power 3.   Legitimate power 4.   Referent power 5.   Expert power Let us discuss these power equations one by one; 1. Reward power: This refers to the capacity of one channel member to reward other if the latter conforms the influence of the former. This power base is present in virtually all channel system. The rewards are usually manifest in the perceived or actual financial gains, which channel member’s experience as the results of conforming to Continue reading

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