Kaizen – Understanding the Japanese Business Philosophy of Continuous Improvement

Operations Management

Role of Leaders in Shaping Organizational Culture

Management Principles

Organizational Culture – Development and Importance

Management Principles

Five Important Organizational Cultural Models

Management Principles

The Customer Satisfaction Model – Based on American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI)

Marketing Management

Achieving Competitive Advantage through Human Resource Development

Human resource development is defined as the framework for helping employees develops their personal and organizational skills, knowledge and abilities. Human resource development involves using a range of learning and training techniques and strategies to change the work related behavior and attitudes of an employee and it also engages in performance management in other to ensure that people can do things well or do new and better things. Human resource development is concerned with enhancing organizational performance through effective development and deployment of organizational members. To enhance performance, a human resource developer has to ensure that the individuals in the organization has the knowledge, expertise and the right attitudes to execute their work, also human resource development aims at ensuring that the organization has the skilled, committed and well-motivated employee it needs to sustain competitive advantage by focusing on processes that develop skills, knowledge and the attitude of the employee, Continue reading

Abey Francis

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Accounting

The term artificial intelligence was first coined by John McCarthy, in 1956, during an interdisciplinary workshop of researchers at Dartmouth. This team of researchers developed the concept of “thinking machines”, which included automata theory, complex information processing and cybernetics. In the mid-to late 50s, General Electric became the first company to purchase a computer to process its payroll system, the UNIVersal Automatic Computer(UNIVAC). UNIVAC ran payroll in all of GE’s factories and stored data on magnetic tape instead of punch cards. The UNIVAC took 40 hours to complete the entire payroll process. During the 60s the U.S. transportation industry developed an electronic data interchanges to standardize transactions between vendors and customers. This was followed by the introduction of the first computer-based software, LANguage for Programming Arrays at Random (LANPAR), began to offer electronic spreadsheets. After LANPAR, VisiCalac and SuperCalc were released in 1970 and 1978 respectively. With each iteration, more functionality Continue reading

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Case Study: Amazon’s Competitive Advantage

Amazon.com is a multinational E commerce company, which was founded by Jeff Bezos who is considered to be one of the world’s top innovative executives. Amazon.com started as an online bookstore and expanded with time to sell almost everything. The role of information system in this company is a leading role, because the company is an online retailer. The company started as an online store for books to rapidly expand to sell everything such us beauty items, auto parts, apparel, electronics and groceries. Amazon’s logo shows an arrow that stretches from A to Z, which also forms a smile to indicate Amazon’s care for customers’ satisfaction. Core Competency The core competencies for Amazon has been identified as customer convenience and accessibility, unlimited options for selection, custom-made services, the superiority of the content of the web site, the efficient and good quality search tool to find the items of one’s choice Continue reading

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Short Selling

Short selling is the selling of a security which is not owned by the seller or any sale that is completed by the delivery of a security borrowed by the seller. It is the process of selling the borrowed stock in the hope that the price of the stock win fall, so that the short seller can buy-back at a profit. In other words short sellers expect to buyback the securities at a lower rate than the price at which they sold. That is, short sellers make profit when the stock price goes down. They involve a lot of risks and pitfalls. Investors purchases stocks from share markets because they believe that a company has good growth prospects, above average management, an advantage on the competition, is undervalued, or for some similar reason. Selling a security short is done for the exact opposite reasons that securities are bought (long).  Stated Continue reading

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Use of Forex Futures

Forex  futures are  futures markets  where the underlying commodity is a foreign currency. Foreign currency futures are essentially the same as all other futures markets (index and commodity futures markets), and are  traded  in exactly the same way.  Forex  futures markets trade futures contracts that reflect the exchange rates of two currencies. For example, the most popular currency futures market is the  EUR  futures market, which is based upon the Euro to US Dollar exchange rate. Hedging with Forex Futures Tenders make use of the market for forex futures/foreign currency futures in order to hedge their foreign exchange risk. For instance suppose a US importer importing goods from India for 1 million Rupees and he needs this amount for making payment to the exporter. He will purchase Rupee at a future settlement date. By holding a futures contact, the importer does not have to worry about   any change in Continue reading

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Case Study on Business Ethics: The Napster Case

Napster is an online service that allows computer users to share high-quality digital copies (MP3s) of music recordings through the Internet. The San Mateo-based company does not actually store the songs but instead provides an access to every user’s hard drive if he is currently logged on to the service. Napster therefore functions as a sort of clearinghouse, which collects stores and disseminates music recordings. Members can log onto this service, search for the song of their choice, by artist or song title, identify where MP3s of interest are and then download them from another user’s computer hard drive. Napster claiming to have around 15 million users in just a years’ time, has become one of the most popular sites on the Internet. Indeed, students were using Napster so much that many universities had to block the website in order to regain bandwidth. Right from its launch, the Napster case Continue reading

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