Building Competitive Advantage

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Competitive Advantage

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Where does your business success begin? If you want to secure a competitive advantage, what are the 3 key areas that you must address?

Your employees or internal customers are your competitive advantage if you want to create a high performance work culture where at least 35% of the employees are engaged in thinking intensive jobs. A reasonable question is the how does one build a foundation from which to develop and then maximize that advantage?

The foundation begins with three 3 and distinct areas or pillars: your systems, your strategies and your people. Each pillar needs to be assessed and then aligned to developing internal customer satisfaction.

When looking at your systems, you will need to look at team building, process improvement, customer loyalty and continuous improvement. Quality leadership will ensure that these systems are both efficient and effective.

Strategy is embedded in your strategic planning process that includes your Vision, Values and current measurable Mission Statement along with all the critical success factors. To develop internal customer satisfaction mandates that your strategy is well communicated within your entire organization.

One simple way to assess the effectiveness of your strategic plan is ask every employee to name the top 3 goals for the current year. And if you get more than 3 answers, you know this is an area that needs immediate attention. Using an organizational assessment tool that incorporates known and proven criteria such as Baldrige helps to determine where your directional gaps are.

The pillar of people include: self leadership skills (interpersonal skills), leadership skills, attitudes and behaviors and business plans for each department. Management development oversees this essential pillar.

When all three areas of systems, strategy and people are aligned to developing achieving the goal of internal customer satisfaction, something almost magical happens. Your employees experience moments of truth that lead to loyal external customers.

TAKE ACTION to think about your strategic plan and how will it is executed in your business. What would happen if every employee could name the top 3 goals of the business for the current year? Would your overall productivity increase? Would you find yourself with greater sales, greater profitability and less costs? Just imagine the possibilities.

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Toyota's 14 Principles : Key Success Factor

Many things to be learnt at Toyota. You can download the toyota 14 principles pdf here and read the analysis below from ezine.

Toyota is clearly a dominate leader in automobile manufacturing today. The principles employed at every level of the company have certainly led to a standard of quality that no one in the automotive industry can argue with. What these principles are and how they are implemented within the Toyota Corporation can certainly help the automakers of the United States and indeed the world achieve the same success.

When these 14 principles are listed and compared with some of the strategies that United States automakers have employed, it becomes clear why Toyota has succeeded as it has.

The 14 principles are known as the "Toyota Way" and are listed below:

1. Base your management decisions on long term philosophies, even at the expense of short term goals

2. Create continuous process flow to bring problems to the surface

3. Use pull systems to avoid over production

4. Level out the workload

5. Build in a method to stop and fix problems when they are discovered, this ensures quality the first time

6. Standardized tasks provide the foundation for continuous improvement and employee empowerment

7. Use visual control so no problems are hidden

8. Use only reliable, thoroughly tested technology that serves you people and processes

9. Grow leaders who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy and can and do teach it to others

10. Develop exceptional people and teams who follow your company's philosophy

11. Respect your extended network of partners and suppliers by challenging them and helping them improve

12. Go and see for yourself so that you completely understand the situation

13. Make decisions slowly by consensus, thoroughly consider all options; implement decisions rapidly

14. Become a learning organization through relentless self examination and continuous improvement

Just by a cursory examination of these fourteen principles, it is easy to understand why Toyota has experienced such a high level of success. The overall process does not allow for overlooking, either deliberately or by accident problems that exist anywhere in the chain of production. Every Toyota employee involved in the manufacturing process has the power to stop production if they see an issue developing. Just this one aspect alone works to ensure that quality vehicles are produced along the assembly line. The twelfth principle: go and see supports and encourages management to stay in touch with design and manufacturing concepts so that they stay in touch with what is actually occurring on the production floor. Number 13 inhibits the business as usual style that can strangle even the most creative of companies. By always encouraging employees to thing outside the box and bring the suggestions to upper level management, fresh new ideas are constantly stimulating innovative and original designs. This ensures that the product never goes stale.

By spending more time up front developing the correct process, the long-term goals of producing exciting affordable qualities vehicles is recognized. Unfortunately, for U.S. automakers, it many times seems that that they approach the production concept from the opposite direction. This might explain why Toyota has pulled away from United States as a leader in the car manufacturing industry. The philosophy appears to have worked well so far and one wonders why someone in America has not had the bright idea to adopt these strategies.

Could it possibly be that many Americans have grown fat and lazy with the early successes achieved by our ancestors? Let us hope that our philosophy as a nation changes quickly, for if it does not, we might find ourselves going the same way as our automotive industry. That is a scary thought indeed.

Human Resource Outsourcing & Benefit

Need the logic information about HR Outsourcing? View the article and research outsourcing research and statistics and read the short explanation below.

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Outsourcing is becoming important in today's business. Outsourcing will help the organization as the certain part of the work is delegated to an external service provider. He will be responsible for looking after day-to-day activities of the work delegated to him. It would be better if the organization communicates with the service provider on a regular basis. The organization should outsource the work for a longer period so that they can maintain a good business relationship with the service provider which will benefit the customers. Outsourcing can be done for marketing, web design & maintenance, manufacturing, recruitment, logistics, distribution, editing. Outsourcing can be done when the process becomes difficult to manage or when the employees do not have the necessary skills.

Outsourcing is done to help the organization to reduce costs, so that they can concentrate on their main activities. It will help the organization to save time and the resources can be used for other important activities. The service provider has to finish the project on time. Credibility and efficiency of the service provider is known if he meets the project deadline. The service provider provides better service quality. The organization does not have to worry about introducing new technologies. The pros through outsourcing are it has reduced costs, tax advantages, removing of personnel problems, expert resources and staffing. It can control operating costs. It increases customer satisfaction. It reduces the overall management burden while retaining control of strategic decision making. It spreads the risk. Provides value added services.

Outsourcing the recruitment process will reduce the recruitment costs up to 20 %. Outsourcing recruitment has 4 major advantages like cost reduction, results, focused management effort and optimal resource utilization. Outsourcing is beneficial to corporate organizations and consultancies. They are inter-related to each other because the corporate organizations use the outsourcing services and the consultancies provide service to the corporates.

There are basically two types of HR Firms. One is professional employer organization (PEO) and Hybrid HR firm. Professional employer organization is for those companies who are contended with handing over the whole HR functions to a 3rd party organization. But if there is a problem in handing out the HR functions to someone else then you may opt for the Hybrid. To choose an employee for an organization the consultant will do certain things like it will define the requirements, advertise, attract the applicants, selecting the applications, interviewing, assessing, conducting tests, reference check and then short listing the applicants.

The organization has to choose whether it is interested in taking up a human resources outsourcing (HRO) provider or a professional employer organization (PEO). HRO provides the specific HR function and PEO provides services like the workers compensation, payroll etc. For smaller concerns a PEO can be beneficial as it can control HR costs such as workers compensation insurance, group health benefits and payroll processing. For larger concerns the HROs work better because they save more money in outsourcing certain specific areas like administration, application management, HR information systems. If only certain functions are outsourced then HRO is the best solution but for a full service solution, PEO will be better.

Key Trends in Human Capital 2008

It is clear from experience, as well as the vast amounts of information available to employers that the HUman Capital Trends are changing. Patterns of migration, issues of diversity and social or educational development are presenting employers the world over with an increasingly difficult and important challenge - where their talent will come from in the future.

In 2008 a large proportion of ‘baby boomers’ are set to retire, and according to large consultancies like Deloitte and BearingPoint, there will be fewer graduates with the 'right critical skills entering the market' who can act as 'ready replacements' for those skilled and experienced employees leaving the market.

Which organisations continue to win the war for talent will be based on many factors, and the demographics of the global work force aren’t going to stand still while businesses try and catch up. This makes having a transparent, consistent and strong employer brand essential, because it allows employers to align their talent acquisition and retention strategies to their corporate values. It also allows companies to project into the market a clear image of themselves, which a potential employee can buy-in to.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers has published its research about recent trends in Human Capital. Download here to view the complete paper : Key Trends in human capital.