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To the students on the Quality and Systems Management Course at Oxford Business College; Estelle, Salome, Ranjith, Peter, Saila, Gayetere, Suyama, Gayeteri, Uvrage, Anurag and Adi (plus babe!)

You kindly wanted to know what I scribbled at the end of the OBC Consultant’s presentation to the Managers of OBC’s Commercial arm, when they outlined the means of implementing EDI into the OBC Company.

And here it is - a statement on the purpose of a business;

“The best possible offer of value, from the customer’s perspective, should be delivered in the fastest possible time, with the least possible defects for the least possible price”

I think it was generally agreed that the introduction of EDI would facilitate this aim. It was generally agreed that customer service, productivity and profitability would all be enhanced. We also agreed that there would be “emotional,” training and user issues in the value system to secure our objectives when introducing EDI.

Of course all this needs to be planned. What better way than to project manage  to accomplish this. There may well be a need to reconvene to discuss all this. What do you think!…and what are the implementation issues.

See you soon

Is ‘profit today’ the only objective of your business?

Ask a businessman what his main objective is, and you’ll invariably get the same response: ‘profit’. But this can be misdirected thinking - or worse. It may endanger the survival of the business itself. Getting profit today could undermine the business of the future.

Objectives are needed in every area where performance and results directly and vitally effect the survival and success of the business. These are two areas that effect every decision of the business and decide what it means to manage a business. They also spell out the results that the business should aim at and what is needed to work effectively towards them.

Every business needs to set multiple objectives, whatever the type of business, economic circumstance, business size and so forth. Here are 8 good ones; market standing, innovation, productivity, resources, profitability, manager performance and development, staff performance and attitude, public responsibility.

The first 5 are economic in character and the last 3 are intangible. This latter group are as important as the first 5 because if they are neglected any business would result in a tangible loss in performance in the first 5 areas.

As business is in fact a community its performance is dependent on the performance of human beings. Thus managers must attend to turning such intangibles into tangible and practical principles and values that are measurable such exceptional performance is achieved.

So profit is in there, but it’s not even top of the list. Should your business re-examine its objectives? Could another look at how you measure yourself improve your profit in the future?

See you soon

Andrew

A client question

We were talking strategy in tough times and then my client blurted out “What about Toyota? What should they do, they are laying people off and halting production!”

That was an interesting one. And then I thought of a couple of things.  The first was how even the largest and most successful companies must constantly reinvent themselves. And the larger and more successful they are, the greater the practical and cultural challenges involved.

I just have this feeling that the business world will be an entirely different place within the next 3 to 5 years. Therefore, now is the time to ask not just questions such as what to offer the targeted customer and who the targetted customer will be but also how to do this efficiently - and differently to competitors.

In fact the whole issue of who, what and how can be used to question the established rules of the game and put innovation back into the heart of strategy.

I’m not sure I solved my clients question at that moment - but then we went on to look at Xojet as a case example

We’ll look at that next time.

BFN

Andy