Organizational Culture – Meaning, Characteristics, Importance and Dimensions

Organizational culture is the set of values that states what an organization stands for, how it operates and what it considers important.  Edgar  H.  Schein  defines organizational culture as the pattern of basic assumptions that a given group has invented, discovered and developed while learning to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration. All the above definitions stress acceptable and unacceptable behavior of its members. For instance, one organization might value solidarity and loyalty to organization more than any other value whereas another organization might stress on good relations with customers. Such values are part of organizational culture in spite of not being formally written like rules and regulations of the organization. They do not usually appear in the organizational training program and in fact, many organizations have difficulty in expressing their cultural values. However, an organization’s values automatically enter every employee’s personal values and actions over Continue reading

Cost Reduction – Meaning and Techniques

Meaning of  Cost Reduction A cost reduction program is a type of method which is to improve profitability of the organization or by expected to get a good result that flow to the bottom line of the financial statement and exempted from any serious damage to the organization itself. As this program is much more about reducing cost or reducing expenses of the organization, so a good cost reduction program is all about how to control the damage of an organization. Furthermore, a cost reduction program is said to be improve the profitability of an organization because by reducing expenses, profits are increased without making others changes. On the other hand, if the cost reduction program can matched with a sales improvement program and perhaps, finally it will get the double profit. A cost reduction program must be a complete plan that is results-oriented. A structured cost reduction program will Continue reading

Data Warehousing – Meaning, Benefits and Implications

What is  Data Warehousing? The term data warehouse or data warehousing was first coined by Bill Inmon in the year 1990 which was defined as a “warehouse which is subject-oriented, integrated, time variant and non-volatile collection of data in support of management’s decision making process”. When referring to data warehousing as subject oriented, it simply means that the process is giving information about a particular subject rather than the details regarding the on-going operations of the company. Moreover, when data warehousing was referred to as integrated it means that the data or information which are gathered from a number of sources are then all gathered to synthesize a coherent whole. On the other hand, data warehousing being time variant simply means that the data available were identified on a particular period. Lastly, data warehousing as being non-volatile means that the data is stable and when a new data is added Continue reading

What is Electronic Customer Relationship Management (eCRM)?

Information Technology has made a huge impact on how a business operates; thereby it is being seen as an important area of commerce which needs to be tapped. Despite the large scale investments in trying to automate a business entity, many businesses have failed to attract customers. The factors such as time frame of response, understanding customer needs and new ways to attract customers are making it difficult for the businesses to cope up with. Customers pose a key role in success of an e-business and it has called for extensive research in understanding the key areas of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in the field of Information technology. Customer Relationship Management from the Information Technology perspective is called as Electronic Customer Relationship Management (eCRM). What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)? In today’s market trend, customers are more educated, better informed, more technology aware and hence demanding more in the service Continue reading

Ranking Method of Job Evaluation

Ranking Method  is the simplest form of job evaluation  method. The method involves ranking each job relative to all other jobs, usually  based on some overall factor like ‘job difficulty’. Each job as a whole is  compared with other and this comparison of jobs goes on until all the jobs have  been evaluated and ranked. All jobs are ranked in the order of their importance  from the simplest to the hardest or from the highest the lowest. The importance  of order of job is judged in terms of duties, responsibilities sand demands on the  job holder. The following steps are involved in ranking jobs. Obtain job information – The first step of ranking method of job evaluation is the job analysis. Job descriptions  for each job are prepared and these are the basis on which the rankings  are made. The job ranking method usually ranks jobs according to ‘the  whole Continue reading

Social Aspects of International Advertising

When we consider International Advertising from the advertiser’s point of view, according to them the primary objective of advertisement is that the product or services which they are offering should be sold in the market. And in achieving the main objective of selling the product or services there are other profound consequences. Advertising puts an influence which is both persuasive and pervasive in nature. Through the selective reinforcement of certain language and values, and social goal, it acts as important force attitudes that underlie behavior not only in the market place, but also in all aspects of life. In an international marketing concern, advertising has an important social influence in a number of ways: many of the international advertising are designed to promote and introduce new products from one market to another. Often this results in sudden change in life-styles, behavior patterns of a society, stimulating for example the adoption Continue reading