performance

The Cursed Shop

Posted on by mohammedala502

“Beware of this haunted shop I heard there was a kid who once entered this shop and never came out. His poor mother lives in misery because of her loss” said Cousin Noah. I still remember that day while my cousin and I were walking passing by this shop located in Arad Town. It was before 20 years but I remember it like yesterday, this shop was called the cursed shop, or the haunted shop. Furthermore the title (cursed shop) came because whenever a restaurant opens in this same shop after a while the business shuts down. By time people started believing that this shop was really cursed, it’s funny how some people are naïve.

 

 

I kept in mind this shop and the different restaurants that opened there; I said to myself there must be a reason behind this. Further investigation in this case I found out the reason was simple; the restaurants did not have good forecasts for the demands of the customers. A restaurant would open to operate and they would order for example a large amount of Kebab given it’s a restaurant serving fresh food they would have many Kebab left unfortunately some were already grilled and been ready to serve, this is just one example. Of course the forecasting was not the only reason, given the place of the restaurant, prices, and demand of customers played a role.

I believe that this restaurant could have avoided the risk by using the forecast starting from Qualitative method (using surveys or even second hand information.)Also using the Quantitative methods to forecast the demand and base the price on the forecasts.

Friday (11th may) class was an eye opening class, I always wanted to know how restaurants were able to survive and know exactly how much portion of meat, salads , fish , or any type of food to prepare each day. From the class exercise I leaned that there are different types of forecasts that addresses different categorize like (Economic, Technological and Demand forecasts.)Furthermore each method is suitable for a different case or scenario. There are two approaches to this matter the Qualitative  including ( Delphi method , consumer market survey , sales force composite) , and the Quantitative method including  ( Naïve approach , moving averages , exponential smoothing , trend projection , linear regression. )Moreover the manager has to know what type of forecast to use because each approach will give an answer however only one answer is accurate and reflects reality.

 

 

CLICKER TIME:

 

Do you believe that Forecasting is vital for any restaurant?

  1. YES
  2.  NO
  3. I didn’t read the article I just want to comment for the 5%

What do you think is the best Quantitative method to use for the restaurant?

 

 

More on restaurants failure click here:

http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/Ec1F07/restaurantsfail.pdf

 

on Time with errors

Posted on by Bashayer

We discussed different aspects of project management during our last class, which are highly important and rewarding if applied properly in real life. However, some projects, if not most, can go towards unwanted directions or results.

In the company I work with, we had a project of launching a new system at a specific budget and within a very short time (6 months). Both cost and time were out of negotiation, so we couldn’t increase the allocated budget nor increase or extend the project period. This was a real challenge and a very stressful situation. So what did we do? We worked together, the project
manager and the functional lead, and put all our effort in planning the project from the different perspectives of a project, such as:

  • Project integration management.
  • Project scope management.
  • Project time management.
  • Project cost management.
  • Project quality management.
  • Project human resource management.
  • Project communications management.
  • Project risk management.
  • Project procurement management.

It might sound a bit complicated, but with the help of PMBOK guide, which is a frame work for project management, we were able to plan and execute the project efficiently.

For more information on PMBOK guide, please click the below link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Guide_to_the_Project_Management_Body_of_Knowledge

Our project was delivered on time and within budget but of course the output quality of the project was not superb. Because the emphasis from the higher management was on time and cost, we had to deliver a lower quality system that suffered from minor issues which were considered as none show stoppers.

Another issue that has contributed to the output quality was the changing requirements of system users. As the project progressed, the end users of the system had a clearer picture of their requirements and how the system should behave in
different cases. Such requests for changing the requirements or adding additional requirements are handled by monitoring and controlling process. Most of the requested changes were considered as chargeable change request, which means that we have to pay additional cost to the system vendor, and this of course was unfeasible, hence, the change requests were declined and the system did not deliver the modified or additional requirements.

From management point of view, they were happy that the project was delivered on time without exceeding project budget, however, from end users’ view; they considered that the project did not fully satisfy their requirements.

I personally think that we could have achieved a better quality results if the project was scheduled for a longer period (more than 6 months) because for any system, it has to meet end users’ requirements, and because it’s the end users who are going to use the system, not the management.

Do you think we should deliver a project on the specified time and cost even if the project’s output suffers from errors?

How would you act if you are in a situation where the higher management is only concerned about time and cost but not performance?

 

Return to Sender: A Growing Liability

Posted on by nadat502

With the innovation in technology and services being offered by banks today it would be logical to think that the volume of physical mail being sent out will shrink substantially seeing a corresponding reduction in the amount of return mail.  However over the past year my Bank has been facing an issue of having to deal with huge amounts of returned bank statements.

There were various reasons as to why the statements were being returned; in this case it mostly attributed to a change in banking regulation-obliging banks to print statements to all deposit accounts where previously were only printed for specific accounts. With the unanticipated amounts of mail pouring in, it deemed essential to start to analyze all the different reasons to why the pieces returned and what is it costing us. What is the total operational cost of postage, printing, handling, research and re-mailing?  What about the value we lost with returned communications? The delayed or missed payments, unawareness of bank charges and the overall customer service expenses?

The bank has already approved a project to centralize, automate and monitor return mail operations. By having all statements to be printed with bar codes and returned back to a central operation that will be able to simply scan the bar codes and capture how many times the statement has returned, and to ultimately stop printing upon the third time.  We will also be able to capture all the problematic accounts and attempt to contact the customer in different methods in order to update their information and encourage them to use e-statements.

I have highlighted one small operation that possibly was not be seen to have a dramatic impact on the banks performance but it is a growing problem and may have a huge impact in the future with our customer base growing everyday. As Head of Customer Resolution I am able to see a lot of the operational and process issues we are facing with at the bank through customer complaints, and by taking this class it has stressed the importance of how reducing operations cost is the best method to optimize in an organization. I am also looking forward to learn the importance of managing quality, and conducting process redesigns and how they ultimately lead to improved efficiency, profitability and operational excellence.

This after all is my view, so do you think our Bank is on the right track with their cost management initiatives?