Process Mapping and Management

$24.99

This book provides a blueprint of how to develop a discipline for process management that applies to any type of orientation.

As the economy moves toward a services orientation, companies are struggling with how to improve their offerings. Process management is a key component of the services that companies provide, and author Sue Conger has written a helpful tool to learn more of this key component now helping companies around the world.

This book has three main parts: mapping, improvement, and error-proofing and metrics. In the first part—mapping—the reader will learn how to map a process so that the map is immediately understandable for identifying the roles, work steps, and automation support used in process delivery. The second part improvement—provides a series of techniques for defining, prioritizing, and analyzing problems from several perspectives. The first perspective is called “leaning,” and its purpose is to remove waste from an existing process. The second perspective is “cleaning,” during which the remaining steps following leaning are analyzed for possible improvement. The third perspective is “greening,” which explores opportunities and trade-offs for outsourcing, coproduction, and environmental improvements related to the process.

The final part of the book—error-proofing and metrics—presents several techniques for ensuring risk mitigation for the new process and for measuring changes that define their impacts and discusses a method for proposing changes to executives in a “case for change.” And throughout this book, Conger provides a blueprint of how to develop a discipline for process management that applies to any type of orientation.

Effective Financial Management: The Cornerstone to Success

$21.99

In a fast changing world, brimming with social and economic uncertainty, financial information plays a vital role in the life of an organization and does so with two sets of eyes. One set looks back to see what has happened. This is the accounting function, which is simply about the recording of events and the production of the financial reports that satisfy the stewardship responsibility of management. The other set looks forward to determine the most appropriate strategic direction for an organization, guiding managerial actions, motivating behaviors, and creating and supporting the cultural values necessary to achieve an organizations strategic objectives. This book is all about the second set of eyes, which are the lenses of STRATEGIC FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT, that help organizations plot their way through an environment filled with opportunities and dangers. For students, aspiring managers as well as those who already have management responsibilities this book provides an insight, through the eyes of the characters of a start-up company, of some of the ideas and models that help to identify the possible strategies capable of maximizing an organization’s value, which is the same as making the owners as wealthy as possible, to determine how to finance the organization in the most proper way, to allocate the collected capital in the most effective way, to monitor the implementation of the chosen strategy to see whether it is meeting the planned objectives, and to reasonably decide on the reinvestment and distribution of profits.

Orchestrating Supply Chain Opportunities: Achieving Stretch Goals, Efficiently

$21.99

Efficient planning and superior execution against clear objectives is the way companies operate best. For many companies, the planning process is carefully orchestrated, objectives are set, budgets are negotiated, resources are allocated, and then it’s up to the organization to execute. But what happens when the unexpected occurs? Say, an event occurs that throws the status quo into turmoil. What if your business declines by 40% in 1 month, what do you do? Conversely, what if your demand spikes by 50% in just a few months, what then? Suppose a natural disaster happens, or a new technology creates a significant, but unplanned opportunity? We call these events ‘stretch opportunities’. This book will focus on strategic thinking and tactical examples of how best to prepare for such events. We will outline common themes across all such challenges. We will introduce three key management concepts: Flexibility, Agility and Real Options. We also include a specific chapter on how to structure supply chains to capitalize on stretch opportunities and we provide specific tactical frameworks to build in agility, flexibility and real options into a supply chain. We will end with a checklist that managers can use to ensure that the right questions are asked in developing supply chains so that the ability to “surge” at profitable opportunities is nourished.

Decision Equity: The Ultimate Metric to Connect Marketing Actions to Profits

$21.99

In this book, the authors introduce Decision Equity as a breakthrough, overarching metric that can help free marketing managers from their existing mental models, and provide avenues to efficiently convert the vast amounts of data at their disposal into powerful information to make informed long-term and short-term decisions about products, customers, markets, and overall business health. There are four key objectives that we wish to achieve through this book. In this book, we introduce Decision Equity as a breakthrough, overarching metric that can help free marketing managers from their existing mental models, and provide avenues to efficiently convert the vast amounts of data at their disposal into powerful information to make informed long-term and short-term decisions about products, customers, markets, and overall business health. There are four key objectives that we wish to achieve through this book. First, we wish to introduce the underpinnings of a new flow-based measurement and management process that can promote truly unshackled thinking both within the marketing function as well as at its interface with other functional areas. Second, we want to demonstrate how firms can win by learning to conceptualize and discover the linkages between marketing and related non-marketing actions and their ultimate marketplace and financial consequences. Third, we aim to provide guidance for how marketing managers and CMOs can significantly improve the outcomes of their decisions by following a verification-based linkage discovery process to connect marketing actions to profits. And fourth, we wish to provide evidence for the efficacy of verification-based thinking centered on the principles of Decision Equity from successful marketing interventions and implementations in well-known organizations.

Business Intelligence: Making Decisions Through Data Analytics

$21.99

This book is about using business intelligence as a management information system for supporting managerial decision making. It concentrates primarily on practical business issues and demonstrates how to apply data warehousing and data analytics to support business decision making. This book progresses through a logical sequence, starting with data model infrastructure, then data preparation, followed by data analysis, integration, knowledge discovery, and finally the actual use of discovered knowledge. All examples are based on the most recent achievements in business intelligence. Finally this book outlines an overview of a methodology that takes into account the complexity of developing applications in an integrated business intelligence environment. This book is written for managers, business consultants, and undergraduate and postgraduates students in business administration.

Building Organizational Capacity for Change: The Leader’s New Mandate

$21.99

Never before have strategic leaders been confronted with so much overwhelming change. The traditional approach taken by the leader or leaders is to direct or control the organizations’ reaction on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. This approach is stressful and overwhelming for executive leaders, makes middle managers feel torn between honoring their senior leaders and listening to the demands of front line employees, and is alienating for front line employees.
This book offers an alternative to the traditional approach by focusing on building the change capacity of the entire organization in anticipation of future pressures to change. Based on systematic research of more than 5,000 respondents working within more than 200 organization or organizational units conducted during the previous decade, this book offers a clear and proven method for diagnosing your organizational change capacity. While building organizational change capacity is not fast or easy, it is essential for effective leadership and organizational survival in the 21st century.

Transforming U.S. Army Supply Chains: Strategies for Management Innovation

$21.99

This text offers a practical approach for understanding the US Army’s extremely complex global logistics system, widely acknowledged as one of the largest in the world. The focus is on inventory management policy where prescriptions are illuminated through the prism of an enterprise supply chain analysis. Although Army aviation logistics examples are emphasized throughout, the fundamental issues and potential solutions are broadly applicable to other large-scale military and industrial supply chains as well. Following a summary of recent trends for background and context, a multi-stage conceptual model of the logistics structure is presented to segment and guide the effort. This multi-stage model is used to systematically analyze major organizational components of the supply chain, diagnose structural disorders and prescribe solutions. Integration challenges are addressed using cost-benefit perspectives which incorporate supply chain objectives of efficiency, resilience, and effectiveness. The design and evaluation section proposes an “analytical architecture” consisting of four complementary modeling approaches, collectively referred to as “dynamic strategic logistics planning”, to enable a coordinated, enterprise approach for Army Logistics Transformation. An organizational construct is presented for an “engine for innovation” to accelerate and sustain continual improvement for Army logistics and supply chain management – a “Center for Innovation in Logistics Systems”. Finally, strategic management challenges associated with enterprise integration and transformational change are addressed: organizational design; management information and decision support systems; strategic alignment for a learning organization; and workforce considerations including human capital investment needs. The text concludes with a relevant historical vignette and closes with a summary of expected benefits.

Doing Business in the ASEAN Countries

$21.99

Southeast Asia is home to the ten ASEAN nations of Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Collectively they comprise a huge market of over half a billion people, with a total land area of 4.5 million square kilometers, a combined domestic product in excess of US$1.1 trillion and total trade of over US$1.4 trillion.
It is the most dynamic and fastest growing region in the world but also has some of the world’s most distinctive cultures and business systems. It offers tremendous opportunities for investors and businesses. But to succeed you need to be familiar with the unique business environment including political and business systems, cultural idiosyncrasies, management practices, social structures, legal frameworks, government priorities, potential competition, establishing relationships and selecting partners, and dealing with corruption and other ethical pitfalls. The book will apply a framework to understand each country along these dimensions
This book is a practical and comprehensive guide to succeeding in ASEAN countries. It allows for a deeper understanding of the business environment of these diverse economies. You will be better able to evaluate the risk factors and make meaningful decisions.

Consumer Behavior: Women and Shopping

$21.99

Why study women and shopping? Why is it important? Women matter because of their consumer spending power; they are crucial to survival in the competitive retail industry in America. Women matter because they control over $20 trillion in consumer spending. Women are better educated, have more financial power and decision making abilities and mobility than any previous generation. Why Women Shop provides a fascinating insight into women’s shopping habits and motivations. This book is of interest to business as they gain a better understanding of the most powerful economic force in the retail industry.

Revenue Management in Service Organizations

$21.99

Revenue management is concerned with maximizing revenue flows while controlling costs and offers a new framework for locating conventional management accounting concepts and methods, in combination with notions of yield management, pricing and process management. The revenue objective provides a unifying goal for the aforementioned concepts and methods that are especially suitable for service organizations where revenue considerations are inextricably linked to the activities performed. This book places revenue management at the forefront of management accounting with cost management and performance measurement in supporting roles. Revenue management introduces new ideas such as yield management, while uniting previously disparate subjects such as project management, capacity costing, and the theory of constraints. Methods of pricing and their associated strategies are included as well as techniques for segmenting consumer markets.