Every company can change if the management begins taking interest for improvement. Most companies fail, because management forgets to give the due attention it needed. The company forgot to organize itself. Also family members ran Merchem’s activities, as it was a family owned company. However the company had to bring in professional to take care over the day-to-day activities as they are much qualified and has the experience to manage such situation
The Company needs to give focus on positioning based on priority. The first one is quality, which is very important for the company to survive on. Secondly it should concentrate on Staff training and human resources Quality: There are many dimensions to quality with definitions that vary among the organizations. By definition program evaluation is “the systematic assessment of the operation and/or the outcomes of a program or policy, compared to a set of explicit or implicit standards, as a means of contributing to the improvement of the program or policy” (Weiss, 1998). One of the major reasons for the instability of the organization was the fact that the company was not able to maintain the right standard in quality systems.
Ensuring consistent quality, safety and protection of environment should be its major quality objectives. High standards of quality and product consistency should be maintained by a comprehensive system covering raw materials, production processes and end products. The management should analyze the situation and come out with suggestions for an enhanced quality management program based on assumptions and comparison of how the existing and the enhanced versions would address the problem situation confronting the firm. The firms should also try new approaches like using systems that might help them to improve its quality program.
Human resource and training: Human resources planning are related to the assignment of the right number of people at the right place and time, in order to perform efficiently the job to be done. Many are the steps in the planning process (from forecasting or recruitment, to rostering definition) in order to achieve these overall objectives (Rampton et al., 1999). The concern with the workforce allocation problem, that is, the task of determining staff numbers in order to provide minimum coverage. Baker (1976), and more recently Mason and Ryan (1998), present a brief survey of some quantitative methods to approach that problem in different settings.
These latter authors, for instance, apply heuristic algorithms and simulation for the integrated staffing problem for the Customs at the Auckland International Airport. Cruz-Cruz (1997) proposes the use of expert systems in the staffing decision-process. For the Company, it is very important to train the staff so as they can give better service to the people. Also staff attitude also matters in service for growth. Staff has to consider there jobs are service oriented, and concentrate more on improving. Also these staff works in a very stressful environment. So they have to be trained in such a way that they can overcome their tensions.
Traditionally in Merchem it has been a common practice to prepare detailed job descriptions and profiles of the “ideal candidate” based on some supposedly impartial reading of what a job involves. Today this practice is less appropriate. Work environments are more volatile than before, and individuals are now required to take personal initiatives in responding quickly to meet the needs of local, and often unforeseen circumstances.
Here, tight job descriptions are manifestly dysfunctional. In recent years, Merchem have become more decentralized in response to the need to cope with increasingly competitive environments and hierarchies have been flattened, pushing decision making closer to the customers. Centralized bureaucratic control and tightly defined job descriptions are giving way to more subtle forms of control which has led to discretionary content being dispersed throughout organizations.
In the recent past discretion has tended to be associated with senior positions. Today individuals are being given more license to define job boundaries themselves. Even in relatively stable environments, the belief that jobs must be done in a particular way, or that individuals must possess a particular set of aptitudes in order to perform a job well, is being questioned. Women and those promoting the cause of minority groups have been particularly vocal in this regard.
The occupational stress indicator (OSI) can be used to enable seven different aspects of the stress/strain relationship to be assessed in Merchem. In the company the employees reported greater pressure or stress at work than is the normal, and at higher levels than in day shift, and were experiencing significantly higher levels of mental and physical ill health as a consequence. Job dissatisfaction was revealed as a major problem for the company as most workers reporting far less satisfaction at work than.
Environmental and political issuses: one of the major problems the company faced was the Environmental issue. The company has to find whether it really pollutes the area and what the company can do about reducing or decreasing the pollution .It should enter in talk with people in the nearby surroundings to enter into agreement, so that the company can work with the people and solve the problem. The company should talk with the union leader and make them understand that instead of being part of any trade union, it would be better if the company has one union, which will look into the employee benefits. Management should try to implement some programs, which will take the employee in their confidence
Use of information Technology: Perhaps this is where the company had lacked back. Even thought being a big company it didn’t have good IT infrastructure. The Company’s Information Technology was managed by its IT team, which didn’t do much to improve anything The Company has four factories and it head office all of them which are in different geographical location but within a 25-mile range. Most people in head office are administration and marketing people while the people in factory are workers and supportive staff. Since people in head office who do the marketing and sales, they need to have good knowledge of the stock position etc
First of all the Company need to integrate its manufacturing, marketing and payroll and make it into a single integrative system by using Enterprise resource planning. SAP would be the best version to go as this as a lot of features and it’s a lot flexible and the company can tailor it to its needs. However such an implementation should be done with proper planning with help from IT Consultants as the investment here is too much and the company cannot effort to make a mistake. Once the Erp is installed the manager can check the stock position, the details of stock manufactured the dates of shipments and how the factory is responding to needs.
Intranet ; Email: Information should flow through the nerves of the organization as it is information that guides the company and perhaps the intranet is what the company cannot afford to miss. Much of the problem at Merchem was that people were not getting the required information at the right time. For example the, management was not knowing the problems of the organization as information was flowing late in the organization.
The intranet can solve this problem. The CEO can get up to date information of the current productions of each factories, the daily sales chart, the order remaining and other areas, which requires attention. Employees can benefit from the intranet by going through the companies policy, refer the employee manual, check their pay slips and other service like, how the companies competitors are doing etc. Email the new artillery in cyber world is the fastest, easiest and cheapest way of communication. All most all employees other than factory worker should be given access to it and it should be effectively used
