Cali guy


I’m planning on getting an associate degree in either business management or marketing management, but whats really the difference?

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Donald Mitchell


ou break even on an offering, you can’t afford to charge less. But where you do make a profit, reducing your profit per unit may be useful to increasing your overall profits. What are the situations you should look at for?

First, you need to think about situations in which having customers buy more of your products and services would cost you very little. In making this evaluation, be sure to consider what your actual costs would be rather than just what your standard costs tell you they would be on average.

Unless you have already done Activity Based Costing, finding out the answer will mean doing some investigating. You should find out how, when, and under what circumstances costs will occur and investments will be required if you sell more. You do need to cover those cash outlays and costs when they occur.

As part of this evaluation, you should also think about how you could change the way you provide your products or services. The growth potential of making products and services available at vastly lower prices should change your perspective.

As you remove price as a barrier to purchase, you will find that your offerings have more fundamental limitations that must be addressed. For instance, how could you offer new attractive benefits that would influence customer behavior by adjusting your offerings?

For instance, if you sell macaroni, could you add more appealing recipes that are easy to make that would appeal to a family on a budget so that they would want to eat macaroni more often? Could you take this one step further, and provide a free container of powdered spices that would inexpensively dress-up the macaroni?

Second, focus on profitable pricing structures that will make increased purchases of your offerings as close to free as possible for a given transaction at a moment in time. Such offerings will often have higher prices for lower volumes of usage and lower prices for higher volumes.

In extreme cases, there may be an annual charge (such as the membership in a warehouse club) that permits access. Such a charge can allow you to drastically drop the prices on the goods you offer, so that their value and the value of the membership will both seem higher.

Sometimes, the same result is achieved by having a minimum charge. If people do not use all of the services needed for overcome the minimum charge, increased use will be free until they do.

Third, understand how the cost of your offerings affects the way your customer thinks about costs. Most companies are very careful about what new expenses they incur because of their focus on producing the budgeted profit amount.

However, many costs never affect that profit number. For example, one reason that investment bankers get paid such enormous fees is that the cost of those fees rarely reduces the profits of their clients.

Usually, accounting rules permit the fees that are charged to be capitalized as a cost of the transaction that has taken place and are counted on the balance sheet rather than running through the profit-and-loss statement. Can what you do be capitalized in some similar fashion rather than being an annual expense for customers?

If not, you may still have some influence over which fiscal years the expenses fall into. There may be more expense budget in a future year (if a company is coming out of a weak period, for example), and pricing that allows the costs to shift between years may well be critical to changing behavior.

Changing when your costs are incurred can also be an opportunity. Imagine if you had locked in the cost of oil as a refiner before the big price increases. You could sell your gasoline at a ten percent lower price than anyone else and sell vastly more until your hedge position ran out. Based on your increased volume, you might well be able to continue to sell at a lower price.

Copyright 2008 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved

Vincent Murphy


So you’ve started a home business venture and are looking for home business tips to make your venture a success. There is no doubt that there is a vast opportunity for entrepreneurial people to make a very good living with a home business.So what are some good home business tips to maximize your profit potential and increase your chances of success? The first of our home business tips is all about marketing. Your business cannot possibly succeed unless your target customer base knows about it. It is important to promote your business wherever you think you can garner interest in the products and services you have to offer. There are plenty of places you can do this at no cost to you. Post messages on Internet message forums dedicated to subjects related to your business. At the very least, you will get interested people to your site and they will remember it even if they don’t buy immediately. This also creates the opportunity for word of mouth viral marketing to other potential clients as well.Other home business tips for marketing include attending conferences or gatherings or joining membership groups related to your business. This allows you to network with other people involved in your business area, thereby maximizing your opportunity to make business contacts on the client and the partner side.Further home business tips include making the most of every opportunity to claim expenses. Save every receipt, because everything from your home phone line and internet connection to your vehicle expenses to your gas to your business wardrobe can be claimed against any income you bring in from your home business.There are many blogs and websites dedicated to proven home business tips that will help you. Before diving in to your new home business, it would benefit you to read through some of these tried and true methods for success and determine how you can apply the concepts to your own home business. Good luck!

Canadian Management Centre


Although sometimes it seems that projects take on a life of their own, the simple fact is that projects don’t manage themselves. It takes the energy and commitment of a number of people to take a project from the initial idea through inception. As more companies embrace the concept of self-directed work-teams that work on specific projects, project management, will become a more vital element of the workplace. The following checklist will help you create a successful project management office:

- Formulate and outline the project

- Break up the project into manageable tasks

- Keep the project on target and complete it on time

Getting Started

The best way to guarantee a project’s success is to start with a strong foundation. Among the questions you should ask when putting together a project kick start:

- Is this something we have done before? If so, what did we learn from the last project?

- Do we have the time and resources to do this project effectively?

- How many people will we need? What sort of expertise should they have?

- Will we need to use outside sources?

- Does top management support the project?

- How long will the project take?

- Once you’ve put together a workable project plan, you need to put an action plan together so:

- Decide how many people will be assigned to the project. Assign people on the basis of their experience and expertise.

Make sure you have a commitment from upper management regarding adequate resources (funding, staff, time, etc.). Make sure, too, that you know exactly what upper management expects in the way of a given project. Communicate your interpretation of their instructions to your supervisors, and make sure you clear up any questions or confusion before the project begins.

Set up a communication network to ensure that everyone is talking with one another; don’t allow people to work in a vacuum.

Create a schedule with specific dates by which different elements of the project will be completed. Build-in a few days to allow for unforeseen problems.

Assign someone the task of keeping records of ongoing progress during the project. This information should be shared with everyone who is working on the project.

If no one from your division has ever worked on this sort of project, consult with people from other departments, or even from other companies (when possible) to get an idea about what to expect.

The Course of the Project

Once the project is under way, there’s a strong tendency to put it on automatic pilot. This makes it harder to fend off potential difficulties, and it cuts off any creative ideas that could enhance the project. Here are some ways to keep things moving effectively through the project’s duration:

Hold regular meetings. These don’t have to be formal three-hour progress sessions - but they should give project members the opportunity to share ideas, voice concerns and ask questions of one another. Some of these meetings should include brainstorming sessions, which promote free flow of creative ideas.

Keep written records of meetings. These make people take the sessions more seriously, and they give anyone who’s unable to attend a point of reference from which to work.

Have individual workers provide you with progress reports. These should not be one-sided conversations. Share your ideas, and offer to address the individuals’ concerns and answer questions as well.

Make sure deadlines are being met. Make it clear that anyone who anticipates missing a deadline should let you know ASAP; this way, you can adjust schedules, or provide people with additional support staff or other resources.

Keep track of what is being spent on the project. Individuals should provide you with information on how much they spend. Let them know how much money they have to work with so they don’t go over budget.

If you’re working with outside contractors or people from other departments, make sure you keep them posted on the progress of the project. You should invite them to at least some of the meetings and brainstorming sessions, and be sure to solicit their opinions.

Solicit the opinions of people in the company who aren’t involved with the project. Sometimes a fresh perspective can provide the best ideas.

Keep upper management apprised of the progress you’re making. This way, you can be alerted to any potential red flags (no manager likes surprises).

The Difference Between Success and Failure

A key factor in the success of the team is its leader. The qualities of a successful project leader include:

- Conscientiousness

- Technical and organizational knowledge

- Honestly/trustworthiness

- Consistency/predictability

- Resourcefulness

When the Project Is Completed

As the project draws to a close, it’s important to remember that a completed project is not a project that is over. Here are some guidelines for dealing with the project’s completion:

Just before the project is complete, meet with the project team as a whole (and one-on-one) to make sure all the loose ends are tied before the project is submitted. Make sure everyone is given credit for contributions.

Remember you don’t have to have a glitzy presentation with video and fancy hand-outs - but your presentation should be professional. Make sure you provide neat, complete copies of your work to upper management, and make certain your presentation is well-planned and professional. A typed copy sent to the supervisor in an interoffice envelope is not enough.

Be sure to give proper recognition to team members when you present the completed project to upper management. It’s important to recognize workers in front of their peers, but they deserve recognition “upstairs” as well.

After the project is over and handed in, gather everyone who worked on it and conduct a postmortem: What were the best aspects of the project? The worst? What mistakes were made, and how can you learn from them? Did you budget, enough time and resources? Too much? Not enough? Do you need more of less outside help for the next project? Who has demonstrated expertise that had previously been ignored? How can the entire process be streamlined? Include your outside contractors and consultants in the postmortem and be sure to get their insights.

GAORFID Technology Solutions Team


RFID technology is facilitating a major innovation to supply chain management. From an article by John Lorinc in the December, 2006 edition of the Globe & Mail Report on Business Magazine, “Every year, according to an expert cited by the Federal Trade Commission, American merchants lose as much as $300 billion (US) in revenues because they’ve lost track of goods somewhere on the journey between factory and store shelf.” Lost revenues are not the only concern in the supply chain, improving the productivity in transporting goods and securing the source of goods are also of concern to professionals managing the supply chain. RFID technology delivers solutions to all these needs.

Overview:

Where does an organization start to realize the benefits of RFID? To answer this, an overview on the technology is a good start. The concept behind RFID is simple; an item (the product, or a pallet) has an RFID tag attached to it. The tag contains a small integrated circuit (IC) chip that contains a unique ID and an antenna that allows it to communicate to an RFID reader. When the tag is attached to the product or pallet and then ‘read’ by the RFID reader, that unique ID is then associated with the product or pallet through your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. This unique ID stays for the remaining part of product’s journey from the factory, right through the consumer’s purchase at the retailer. The RFID readers are then placed at all key junction

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points in the supply chain. As the products or pallets pass through these readers, your ERP system is updated immediately on the flow of goods. This automation in the process reduces time spent with manual entry and the potential for human error of bill-of-lading details, provides real time updates on where goods are, makes more secure the integrity of your product shipments and helps you address bottlenecks in the system faster.

A Starting Point:

Therefore a good starting point to deploy RFID technology is at the pallet or carton/container level. Goods assembled in these vessels are then tracked in batches defined at the source. The benefits, here, are that fewer tags are needed, since a single tag is identified with a ‘batch’ of goods instead of the individual unit of product. Another benefit of tagging the pallets and containers is to continuously track the whereabouts of these vessels used to move the goods and this helps to cut down these assets being lost in the supply chain and needing to be replaced. Another reason to start an RFID solution at the container level is because many individual products pose challenges for RFID technology by the way they are packaged. Metal goods, goods that contain liquids and very small items pose a challenge to doing individual item tracking. RFID solutions are available here, but the cost goes up considerably. The direction of the technology is toward tracking all individual units of products. With advances in RFID technology, costs per tag will be driven lower and this will allow more RFID tagging of individual product units.

Open Standards:

The realization of the benefits of RFID technology is also very dependent on open standards in the industry. Open standards will allow manufacturers, distributors and retailer to use a common type of tag(s) and reader(s) while allowing this hardware to interact with their own ERP needs and deliver the efficiencies promised by RFID technology. EPCglobal Inc., the standards body that manages UPC (Universal Product Code) information in bar codes, sets the standards for how basic product information is encoded in the RFID chips. The standard set for supply chain management is referred to as “GEN 2”. GEN 2 has brought significant advantages over the previous evolving standards of “Class 0” and “Gen 1” and these include:

(a) GEN 2 can write to tags multiple times,

(b) GEN 2 has longer read ranges,

(c) GEN 2 has greater data storage capacity and

(d) GEN 2 has more reliable and faster read rates.

GAO RFID Solutions for SCM:

For more information on how RFID technology can help your challenges in the supply chain, please contact us at sales@gaorfid.com or call us at (416) 292-0038, ext. 601.