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

Case Study: Marketing Strategies of IBM

International Business Machines Corporation, better known as IBM, is a multinational IT company involved in the manufacture and retail of computer hardware and software applications, and IT consulting services. The company has established itself as one of the selected information technology companies since 19th century. Adoption of marketing strategies for IBM has been a planned structure since 19th century and by means of these strategies it has earned enough success all over the world. With its growth in the manufacturing as well as marketing domains of computer hardware and software, it has gained the nickname of “Big Blue”. On marketing grounds, IBM follows strict infrastructural services, added by hosting provisions and consulting services in various areas from mainframe computers to the persuasion of nanotechnology. Well – devised and efficient marketing strategies have been the key to IBM’ global success. The company strongly believes that devising effective marketing strategies requires making Continue reading

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Narasimham Committee on Banking Sector Reforms (1998)

In spite of the optimistic views about the growth of banking industry in terms of branch expansion, deposit mobilization etc, several distortions such as increasing NPAs and obsolete technology crept into the system, mainly due to the global changes occurring in the world economy. In this context, the finance ministry of Government of India appointed Mr. M. Narasimham as chairman of one more committee, this time it was called as the committee on banking sector reforms. The committee was asked to “review the progress of banking sector reforms to the date and chart a programme on financial sector reforms necessary to strengthen India’s financial system and make it internationally competitive”. The Narasimham committee on banking sector reforms submitted this report to the government in April 1998. This report covers the entire issues relating to capital adequacy, bank mergers, the condition of global sized banks, recasting of banks boards etc. The Continue reading

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Marketing Channel Conflicts

Conflict is an inherent behavioral dimension in all social system including the marketing channel. In any social system, when a component perceives the behavior of the other component to be impending the attainment of its goal or the effective performance of its instrumental behavior pattern, an atmosphere of frustration prevails. When this frustration is not resolved by the other component, a stage of conflict may exist. More over if the other component also perceive it as the blockage in its attainment of goal then both the components become objects of each other frustration and the conflict arises. In distribution channel, the same is also applicable. Here the conflict may be sales man versus distributor, distributor versus wholesaler, wholesaler versus retailer and so on. Some time in bigger organizations the conflict may arise between product company versus supply company, sales department versus production department. This type of channel conflict are more Continue reading

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Sales Promotion – Definition, Purpose, Objectives and Types

Sales promotion is one of the most loosely used terms in the marketing vocabulary. We define sales promotion as demand stimulating devices designed to supplement advertising and facilitate personal selling. In other words, sales promotion signifies all those activities that supplement, co-ordinate and make the efforts of personal selling and advertising more effective. It is non recurrent in nature which means it cant be used continuously. Concept of Sales Promotion Sales promotion consists of diverse collection of incentive tools, mostly short-term designed to stimulate quicker and / or greater purchase of a particular product by consumers or the trade. Where as advertising offers a reason to buy, sales promotion offers an incentive to buy. Sales promotion includes tools for consumer promotion (for example samples, coupons, prizes, cash refund, warranties, demonstrations, contest); trade promotion (for example buying allowances, free goods, merchandise allowances, co-operative advertising, advertising and display allowances, dealer sales contests); Continue reading

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Lean Thinking – Concept and Principles

Concept of  Lean Thinking Lean Thinking originated from manufacturing methods used by Japanese automotive manufacturers, especially from Toyota.  Lean thinking is basically about getting the right things, to the right place, at the right time, in the right quantity while minimizing waste and waiting time and being flexible and open to change. A term coined by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones in their book “Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation”  to describe an exceptionally focused, efficient, agile and  successful organisation. Lean thinking provides a way to specify value, sequence value-creating actions in the best way, conduct these activities without interruption whenever someone requests them, and perform them more and more effectively.   Lean thinking means doing more and more with less and less resources while providing customers with exactly what they want. “Becoming ‘lean’ is a process of eliminating waste with the goal of Continue reading

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Ethical Hackers and Ethical Hacking

An ethical hacker is a security professional who helps organization to take defensive measures against malicious attacks and usually the process he doing to find those vulnerable point is called Ethical Hacking. Sometimes this is also known as Penetration Testing or Intuition Testing. In this case, the ethical hackers are getting into the minds of computer criminals; think like them to find about innovative ways the hackers may use to get into the systems. Then organizations can take required actions to avoid those vulnerabilities. It has identified that the almost all computer systems have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by a hacker to come to do damages. This can be due to an unpatched application, a misconfigured router or a rough network device and it will be not able to detect unless penetrate the networks and assess the security posture for vulnerabilities and exposures regular basis. As the hacking is Continue reading

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