Guide to Business Continuity Management: Frequently Asked Questions
This report takes an in-depth look at the many issues and events that are driving the need for improved business continuity management practices, and the steps companies can take to implement an effective Business Continuity Management (BCM) program. It reviews in detail numerous BCM areas and strategies, including an overview of the regulatory landscape, risk assessment and business impact analysis, program design, business alignment, training, … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Source: Protiviti | Subjects: Operations, Risk Management
Bob Prosen
An important and often overlooked aspect of operational excellence is regularly comparing actual costs to budget assumptions – not just the numbers in the plan. Understanding assumption deviations will help improve the accuracy of future forecasting.
Content: Quotation | Source: Kiss Theory Good Bye | Subjects: Finance, Operations
Increase the Success of Your Knowledge Transfer Effort
Knowledge transfer is one of the first tasks of transitioning to an outsourced model, but it’s sometimes overlooked or under-planned, resulting in a shaky start to the relationship. Here’s how to do it right.
Content: Article | Authors: AJ Warner, Neil Brown | Source: CIO Magazine | Subjects: Knowledge Management, Outsourcing / BPO
Global Spending on Offshored Engineering
Next Generation Outsourcing: Ensuring Success After Signing The Deal
Booz Allen Hamilton research reveals that a third of those who outsource fail to achieve the expected benefits. Is that outcome inevitable? Absolutely not, if companies pay close attention to outsourcing governance.
Content: Article | Source: Strategy& | Subject: Outsourcing / BPO
Lean Manufacturing: A Primer
It is not exactly breaking news that, due to the need for driving down costs and increasing efficiency, manufacturers (if not enterprises of all kinds) are increasingly subject to massive pressures. These pressures, however, often invalidate the traditional materials requirements planning (MRP) batch- and push-based production planning and associated economies of scale product costing approaches. For this reason, there has been increased interest in the … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: P.J. Jakovljevic | Source: TechnologyEvaluation.com | Subject: Operations
Manufacturing Myopia
Instead of drifting into decline and irrelevance, producers of goods have a chance to seize the future.
Content: Article | Authors: Conrad Winkler, Kaj Grichnik, Peter von Hochberg | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Operations
Insourcing 101
Yossi Sheffi
Currently, in some industries, the difference in the cost of labor is such that they have no choice but to outsource to, say, China. But in other industries, the choice is not always so clear. My feeling is that in many cases not all costs in terms of increased risks are taken into account. One of the problems is that we don’t have good metrics … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Outsourcing / BPO, Risk Management
Kaj Grichnik, Conrad Winkler, and Peter von Hochberg
Many manufacturers look at cost data primarily as justification and leverage for continually trimming expenses, rather than as a source of insights about scale, capital spending, labor deployment, technology, logistics, and supply chain efficiency – all critical factors in measuring how well a company’s manufacturing processes stack up against the competition.
Content: Quotation | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Operations
Just in Case: Balancing risk and return in global supply chains
As you push deeper into uncharted supply chain territories, managing risk becomes critical. Executing the supply-to-market strategy and tactics that best support your business requires investment in new forms of internal analysis and a willingness to make decisions that fly in the face of organizational precedent.
Content: Article | Authors: David Bovet, Eric Vratimos, Jonathan Gove | Source: Mercer Management Journal | Subject: Operations
Jonathan Cowan, Katrina Helmkamp, Jim Hemerling, Hubert Hsu, Michael Zinser
Successful companies ask themselves, “What must I keep at home?” rather than “What can I send to LCCs?” The burden of proof shifts from the LCC advocate (often procurement) to the existing producer (manufacturing), which now needs to prove – and improve – its own competitiveness. Best-practice companies investigate and communicate the LCC options and costs, specify the target costs that will be considered competitive, … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Outsourcing / BPO
HR Outsourcing Poised for Breakthrough
Implementing Total Quality Management
This artilce is ostensibly about TQM and offers its five pillars of successful quality processes (customer satisfaction, total involvement, measurement, systematic support, and continuous improvement). That’s not why you should read this article. You should read it because it also offers a generally applicable framework for implementing change, projects, etc.
Content: Article | Author: Donald L. Weintraub | Source: Prism (Arthur D. Little) | Subjects: Change Management, Operations
Characteristics of Forecasting Methods and Their Relationships
Measuring the Success of International Logistics Partnerships
International logistics partnerships are a key class of strategic alliance, but until now little has been known about their performance. The paper “Measuring the Performance of Intenational Logistics Outsourcing Partnerships: A Dyadic Perspective Analysis” introduces, for the first time, a reliable methodology to measure the performance of a partnership between a logistics provider and its customer. Using data from 75 top European logistics companies and … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Authors: África Ariño, Alejandro Lago, Joan Jané | Source: IESE Insight | Subjects: Operations, Outsourcing / BPO
A Long-Term Commitment
A recent Accenture global survey of more than 500 companies, combined with 32 in-depth interviews with experienced outsourcing executives, demonstrates a new maturity in the way businesses and governments are working the outsourcing lifecycle, and reveals hard-won expertise in getting the most from outsourcing partnerships. These executives embrace outsourcing as a mainstream management tool for improving performance and increasing productivity. Far from a one-shot quick … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Authors: Adam Johnson, Philip A. George | Source: Outlook Journal (Accenture) | Subjects: Management, Outsourcing / BPO
Shifting Your Supply Chain into Reverse
“Satisfaction guaranteed” is still promised by many retailers today. But what happens to those returned products? How do the retailer and the manufacturer handle them? Both have traditionally focused on delivering goods to customers, not on managing their return in an efficient manner. The handling of returned products, often called reverse logistics, is an often-neglected part of an otherwise efficient supply chain.
Pressures to improve customer … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Authors: Charles Harthan, Patrick Van den Bossche, Sean Monahan | Source: Kearney | Subject: Operations
Offshoring and Beyond
Companies that send their back-office jobs offshore often cut their labor costs by as much as half. But new research by the McKinsey Global Institute finds that these companies risk leaving billions of dollars in savings behind if they merely replicate what they do at home in countries where labor is cheap. The savviest operators redesign business processes to exploit automation and take full advantage … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Authors: Diana Farrell, Jaana K. Remes, Vivek Agrawal | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Outsourcing / BPO