Designing Strategy-Supportive Reward Systems in Organizations

Creating a strategy-supportive reward structure for an organization is an important task as it is a powerful management tools for gaining employee buy-in and commitment. Meanwhile, the key to creating a reward system is to promote relevant measures of performance that the dominating basis for designing incentives, evaluating individual and group efforts, and handling out rewards. In a competitive business climate, more business owners are looking at improvements in quality while reducing costs. While businesses need to get more from their employees, their employees are looking for more out of them. Employee reward and recognition programs are one method of motivating employees to change work habits and key behavior’s to benefit a business. As the strategy-supportive reward structure motivates and attracts the employee, designing the reward structure for an organization is quite complex. This is because the importance of the reward structure should define on the job and assignment in Continue reading

CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) Tools

CASE is an acronym for computer Aided Engineering. This involves using software packages to accomplish and automate many of the activities of the information system development including software development or programming. Building Blocks Computer Aided Software Engineering can be a single tool that supports a specific Software Engineering activity to complex environment that encompasses tools, a data of people, hardware, network operating system standards and other components i.e. environment architecture composed of hardware platform and operating system support lays the ground work for CASE. But the CASE environment itself needs other building blocks. A set of portability services provides a bridge between CASE tools and their integration framework and the environment architecture. The integration framework is a collection of specialized programs that enables collection of   specialized programs that enables individual’s CASE tools to communicate with one another, to create a project database and to exhibit the same look and Continue reading

Factors Influencing the Product Line Decisions

The extent to which a company can add new products is not unlimited.   Very often, the scope for having new products is in some way related to the existing conditions of the firm.   The goods may be : 1. Cost Related Goods A company may decide to add a product which may be the result of a common production process.   For example, a company which strikes oil may decide to produce petrol or mobil oil, kerosene, gas, wax, etc.   A company producing sugar may decide to produce molasses. 2. Demand Related Goods A firm may decide to add a product which is jointly demanded.   For example, manufacturers of Sulekha Ink have gone in for production of other related items of stationery like sealing wax.   Food Specialties Ltd. added Maggi to their various food products.   Weston Electronics, manufacturers of tape recorders, colour TV sets, Continue reading

Human Resource Accounting

To ensure growth and development of any organization, the efficiency of people must be augmented in the right perspective. Without human resources, the other resources cannot be operationally effective.  The success or otherwise of an organization depends on how best the scarce physical resources are utilized by the human resource. What is important here is that the physical resources are being activated by the human resources as the physical resources cannot act on their own. Therefore, the efficient and effective utilization of inanimate resources depends largely on the quality, caliber, skills, perception and character of the people, that is, the human resources working in it. The term Human resource at macro level indicates the sum of all the components such as skills, creative abilities, innovative thinking, intuition, imagination, knowledge and experience possessed by all the people. “Human Resource Accounting” is the offshoot of various research studies conducted in the areas Continue reading

Organization Change Management Models

Change whether planned or unplanned occurs in all organizations and at all levels. Change is inevitable and thus today many organizations prepare themselves for change. However the successful organization recognizes and understands the fact that change is not only inevitable it is also required in order to grow and stay ahead of competition. Therefore such organizations plan and implement change. Planning and implementing change requires the expertise of  Organization Development experts who rely on certain models of change. Some of the popular organization change  management models, which have received attention globally, are: 1. Kurt Lewins Model of  Change Management One of the earliest models of planned change was put forward by Kurt Lewin in 1975. Lewin explained that organizations like human beings prefer to stay in a state of equilibrium or a steady state called as homeostasis. He observed that the stability of human behavior was based on “quasi- stationary Continue reading

Syndicated Data and Standardized Services in Marketing Research

Today, over $20 billion a year is spent on marketing/advertising/public opinion research services around the world. Spending on marketing research is $6.9 billion in the United States alone. During the past two decades, the research market has become highly concentrated, with about 54 percent of the market being held by the 50 largest worldwide organizations. The other half of the market is shared by a thousand or more small research firms. The concentration is even more pronounced in the United States, where the 10 largest firms account for 64 percent of total U.S. spending for marketing research. In the highly competitive retail market, understanding the customer is paramount. In order to fill in the gaps of consumer’s buying motive and actual buying, companies have to understand the customers, and of course, marketing research is the tool for gaining knowledge about the customers. Marketing research is a systematic gathering of information Continue reading