Forces. Internal Driving Forces Are Those Kinds of Things, Situations, or Events That Occur Inside The
Forces. Internal Driving Forces Are Those Kinds of Things, Situations, or Events That Occur Inside The
Forces. Internal Driving Forces Are Those Kinds of Things, Situations, or Events That Occur Inside The
Change is inevitable, and those organizations who do not keep up with change will become unstable, with long-term survivability in question. There are things, events, or situations that occur that affect the way a business operates, either in a positive or negative way. These things, situations, or events that occur that affect a business in either a positive or negative way are called "driving forces or environmental factors." There are two kinds of driving forces; Internal driving forces, and external driving forces. Internal driving forces are those kinds of things, situations, or events that occur inside the business, and are generally under the control of the company. Examples might be as follows organization of machinery and equipment, technological capacity, organizational culture, management systems, financial management employee morale. External driving forces are those kinds of things, situation, or events that occur outside of the company and are by and large beyond the control of the company. Examples of external driving forces might be, the industry itself, the economy, demographics, competition, political interference, etc. Whether they are internal or external driving forces, one thing is certain for both. Change will occur! A company must be cognizant of these changes, flexible, and willing to respond to them in an appropriate way.
External driving forces can bury a business if not appropriately dealt with. The question is, how does a business know what changes are occurring so that they can deal with them in a positive way. OK, that's the next issue. In order for a business to succeed and gain the competitive edge, the business must know what changes are indeed occurring, and what changes might be coming up in the future. I guess you might call this forecasting. Thus, critical to the business is what we call "informational resources." It is the collection and analyzation of data. Some examples of critical information might include the following: Competition (what are they doing?) Customer behavior (needs, wants, and desires) Industry out look (local, national, global) Demographics (the change populations, there density, etc.) Economy (are we peaking, or moving negatively) Political movements and/or interference Social environment Technological changes General environmental changes The above are just some issues organizations must be on top of. Well it's never easy, but businesses that are successful include all of the above (and more), to develop the appropriate tactics, strategies, and best practices, to ensure successful out comes.
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Business organizations need to improve to meet the challenge of world competitiveness. Productivity and quality improvement is most effective when it is done in a balanced manner to include managerial, behavioral and technical initiatives. Organizations need to introduce a much more data-driven orientation, facilitating both grassroots continuous improvement and top-down strategic projects to correct bench-marked shortfalls. The most common improvement theme is taking the variation and waste out of upstream systems in order to create complete customer satisfaction with finished products and services.
Most PopularCBS MoneyWatch.com Blogs World's Richest Women: Oprah NOT on Top Wall Street Pay: Where's The Shareholder Rage? Kitchen Appliances: How Long Do They Last? 6 Things You Should Never Reveal on Facebook Top 20 Best-Paying College Degrees in 2010 IT IS GENERALLY agreed that the United States could do a great deal better as a nation in productivity and quality improvement. Many differences of opinion prevail about how much better is necessary and/or possible, the role of government industrial policy in national improvement, and which industries are ahead or behind on the issue. But we are back to general agreement again with the idea that much (or all) of the responsibility for national improvement rests with the millions of individual firms and public agencies that make up the economy. Organizations will take up the improvement challenge in different ways and for different reasons, but behind it all is the need to be internationally competitive, either directly or as a supplier to those who compete abroad. (1) All organizations need to improve; all have occasionally done so accidentally or otherwise. Larger organizations have typically been studying and later implementing improvement initiatives under different names for years. Relatively recently, smaller organizations have realized the necessity for improvement on their own or, many times, through a "supplier program" of a major customer. So, the challenge is clear -- everyone must improve. How organizations are going about it is the subject of this article. A composite set of "best practices" is presented, recognizing that what is specifically appropriate will vary widely from organization to organization. Akey reference is provided for each category of best practice to allow for further study by the reader. ORGANIZATIONAL IMPROVEMENT
One source of confusion in sorting out best practices in organizational improvement is that very similar activities and initiatives carry a variety of names, depending on whether the majo theme is quality, productivity, customer satisfaction, excellence, competitiveness or something else. Quality, for example, can be defined in a number of wasy. (2) Older definitions emphasize fidelity to a set of final product or service standards or specifications worked out by the organization in the past with (presumably) some reference to the customer's interest. More recent definitions feature the customer's complete satisfaction, excitement, or delight with the final product or service. (3) The most recent definitions accept the need for complete customer satisfaction, but also recognize that the organization itself needs to design, install and operate high quality internal systems that allow customer satisfaction to occur, and the organization must operate in a strategic context that is satisfactory to all stakeholders, not just customers. Productivity starts from a definition that relates an amount of physical output to its related labor input. More recent work has recognized that other inputs (capital, materials, energy, business services) are appropriately the subject of productivity analysis, and that output, especially in support groups or service-providers, may not be clearly physical. Productivity improvement requires balanced attention to the behavioral and managerial systems in addition to the technical configuration. (4) Output should not be counted unless it is "good" output. Thus we find quite a convergence between organizational productivity improvement and organizational process quality improvement. Both are aimed at the customer's interest in better (including lower cost) products and services and are achieved through balanced systems improvement. Total Quality Management provides the best current example of a comprehensive improvement philosophy. Even this comes in different flavors and sizes, but the "total" in Total Quality Management has four fundamental definitions: horizontal, vertical, intellectual, and strategic. Horizontal means that the unit of analysis is the business process that cuts its way across the organization, starting with external suppliers, passing through operational and/or support groups of the organization and ending with the final customer. Every person or subgroup making up part of the process has one or more immediate suppliers and one or more immediate customers, most of these being "internal" to the organization. Each supplier-customer interface should exhibit the care and attention normally associated with external contacts. Departmental memberships is an organizational convenience but should not influence the effort put into a process
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Vertical total means that all levels of the organization have adopted the basic quality ethic and apply it in the processes they touch or otherwise influence. Quality is not the exclusive interest of production workers, or executives, or first-line supervisors. Problem-solving teams are often made from several organizational levels. There is a quality way to issue legal opinions and to advertise the products, just as there is a quality way to make and sell the products.
Most PopularCBS MoneyWatch.com Blogs World's Richest Women: Oprah NOT on Top Wall Street Pay: Where's The Shareholder Rage? Kitchen Appliances: How Long Do They Last? 6 Things You Should Never Reveal on Facebook Top 20 Best-Paying College Degrees in 2010 An intellectual total means that the thoughts and models that drive the improvement process have been derived from and reflect the best of managerial, behavioral and technical thinking. It is easy to spot imbalance as executives describe their organization's efforts. It is easy to talk about "empowering" workers, for example, but if the organizational structure is still designed for control of job processes, there won't be much voluntary redesign by the work force. Process control statistics will be of little use if no one understands them. Finally the subject of the improvement effort must be that which is strategically important to the organization. Improvement efforts can start out with pilots or "practice" initiatives, but ultimately there must be a linkage between the main subject matter of the various improvement teams and the priority needs of the organization as identified in the strategic planning exercises. That is where the Quality Circles of the late 1970s and early 1980s fell short of the original expectation. They were generally established within single departments and chose their improvement issues from the immediate neighborhood, rather than being prefocused on issues (typically cutting across departments) that were of high priority to the organization. What all Total Quality Management (or, for that matter, Total Productivity Management) efforts have as underlying principles are: continuous improvement, management-by-fact, and "every work station a control point." The intent is that each worker at each level takes upon himself/herself to do the work right the first time, never pass on bad work, and strive to make improvements in the work processes based on data they receive (or generate themselves) concerning "their" process(es).
MANAGERIAL INITIATIVES One of the trickiest parts of the productivity and quality literature is the shifting role of the "planning" process. In order to start a formal productivity or quality effort in an organization where there has not been one before, it is clearly necessary to plan what is to be done. Where will this effort begin, what is the role of senior managers, who carries the day-to-day coordination responsibility, what tools and techniques will be brought in and taught and in what timing, how will the effort be communicated and by whom, and who decides the project priorities? In the past, productivity and quality work has often been grafted onto an existing management process by loosely authorized zealots. However, the essence of productivity and quality improvement is that line managemen takes full responsibility for "grass roots" improvement itself. Increasingly, the productivity or quality effort has been started from the top in a systematic manner, making the zealots advisory or even unnecessary. Routine line management takes its main direction from the strategic business plan, so the productivity and/or quality plan eventually needs to be folded into the routine business plan and cease its independent existence. Thus the common phrase among productivity and quality managers or advisors is that their goal is to work themselves out of a job. In other words, the formal organization initially required for such an effort becomes unnecessary within a few years as productivity and quality thinking becomes fully absorbed into the "routine" business direction of the line managers of the organization.
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In this intermediate time period, great attention needs to be given to integrating the quality effort and the business planning process. This is most frequently done through assessment projects. An early part of most formal improvement efforts is to conduct, or have conducted, an assessment of the quality and productivity improvement potential of the organization. The type of criteria associated first with the NASA Quality and Excellence Award (for its contractors) and more recently with the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (for all private industry) are now the most commonly used basis for this exercise. By setting the priority targets of the improvement process to be supportive of the already-determined key targets of the strategic business planning process, the organization lays the groundwork for eventual "disappearance" through absorption of the formal productivity or quality process. (5)
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Wall Street Pay: Where's The Shareholder Rage? Kitchen Appliances: How Long Do They Last? 6 Things You Should Never Reveal on Facebook Top 20 Best-Paying College Degrees in 2010 Terms associated with the planning aspect of quality are Hoshin Planning and Quality Function Deployment. (6) To somewhat oversimplify, the leading Japanese companies have succeeded in pushing the planning process down further in the organization than is standard practice in the U.S. Hoshin Planning takes the top level plans and decomposes them into the implications for lower organizational groups. QFD takes another cut through the organization. What are the implications for upstream processes of the findings from analysis of the input from and about downstream customers' requirements and expectations? Another managerial initiative that will be of significant additional importance as comprehensive productivity and quality efforts become common-place is Activity Based Cost Management. (7) Managerial Accounting as a profession has been eclipsed by Financial Accounting over the past fifty years or so. The main data generated by an accounting organization serve to feed the reporting process to the outside world rather than the internal process of managing the business. Thus cost allocations tend to follow easily understood but otherwise unnatural category breakdowns that are thoroughly divorced from their reasonfor-being. "Overhead" has no single reason for being there. It needs to be decomposed and attached to its various reasons-for-being (or "drivers") to allow proper costing, pricing and waste elimination analyses. Connections need to be made also between the improvement initiatives of an organization and its reward and recognition systems. Normal corporate rhetoric will suggest that the connection has been made at the top executive level. Most organizations claim that executive total compensation is partly a function of organizational performance, although most of the evidence is that this connection is loose and long-term at best. There is little disagreement that the connection between organizational performance and the pay of the main work force is limited to firing and promotion time, with an occasional employee-of-themonth or caps and jackets ceremony.
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