Week Thirteen - Project Management

Explain the triple constraint and its importance in project management.

The triple constraint involves making tradeoffs between scope, time and cost for a project.  It is inevitable in a project life cycle that there will be changes to the scope, time or cost of the project. These three variables are interdependent: You cannot change one without changing the others. Project management is the science of making intelligent trade-offs among time, cost, and scope.

2. Describe the two primary diagrams most frequently used in project planning

Two primary diagrams used in project planning include PERT and Gantt charts:

PERT chart – a graphical network model that depicts a project’s tasks and the relationships between those tasks 

1. Dependency
2. Critical path

 

 

Gantt chart – a simple bar chart that depicts project tasks against a calendar.

 

3.Identify the three primary areas a project manager must focus on managing to ensure success

A project manager must focus on managing three primary areas to ensure success:
1. Managing people
2. Managing communications
3. Managing change

Managing people is one of the hardest and most critical efforts a project manager undertakes. Resolving conflicts within the team and balancing the needs of the project with the personal and professional needs of the team are two of the challenges facing project managers.

4.Outline 2 reasons why projects fail and two reasons why projects succeed.

WHY PROJECTS FAIL	WHY THEY SUCCEED
Failure to align project with organizational objectives Poor scope Unrealistic expectations Lack of executive sponsorship Lack of project management Inability to move beyond individual and personality conflicts Politics	Project Sponsorship at executive level Good project charter Strong project management The right mix of team players Good decision making structure Good communication Team members are working toward common goals

Week Twelve - ERP and Collaboration

1.   Explain the business value of integrating SCM, CRM and ERP systems

 SCM, CRM and ERP are the backbone of e-business. Integration of these applications is the key to success for many companies. Integration allows the unlocking of information to make it available to any use, anywhere at any time. The following figure illustrates primary users and business benefits of strategic initiatives.

—2. What is meant by “extended ERP”?

Core ERP components are the traditional components included in most ERP systems, which primarily focus on internal operations. Extended ERP are the extra components that meet the organisational needs not covered by the core components and primarily focus on external operations.

—  Extended ERP components include:

—        Business intelligence (BI)

—        Customer relationship management (CRM)

—        Supply chain management SCM)

—        e-Business components include:

—             e-Logistics

—             e-Procurement

—3. Why it is important to have an enterprise-wide view of data?

 

ERP systems collect data from across an organisation and correlate the data, generating an enterprise-wide view. The true benefit of an ERP system is its ability to take the many different forms of data from across the different organisational systems and correlate, aggregate, and provide an enterprise-wide view of organisational information.It is important to have an enterprise-wide view of data as without the ability of information to be shared across organization, inconsistency across business operations occour.

 

—4. What are some ways that different departments or even different organisations collaborate?

 Organisations create and use teams, partnerships, and alliances to:

—        Undertake new initiatives

—        Address both minor and major problems

—        Capitalise on significant opportunities

 

  Organisations create teams, partnerships, and alliances both internally with employees and externally with other organisations.Information technology can make a business partnership easier to establish and manage. The Internet has dramatically increased the ease and availability for IT-enabled organisational alliances and partnerships. Information partnership – occurs when two or more organisations cooperate by integrating their IT systems, thereby providing customers with the best of what each can offer. Collaboration systems such as groupware enable, support, and facilitate internal and external team collaboration.People skills, or soft skills, in addition to business knowledge and analytical skills are important. Successful people rarely work in isolation.

Collaboration systems include:

—  Knowledge management systems (KMS)

—  Content management systems (CMS)

—  Workflow management systems (WMS)

—  Groupware systems

—5. What is Knowledge Management?

—  Knowledge management (KM) – involves capturing, classifying, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing information assets in a way that provides context for effective decisions and actions.

Week Eleven - CRM & BI

1. What is your understanding of CRM?

Customer relationship management (CRM) – involves managing all aspects of a customer’s relationship with an organisation to increase customer loyalty and retention and an organisation's profitability. CRM helps companies make the their interactions with customers seem friendlier through individualisation

2. Compare operational and analytical customer relationship management.

Operational CRM - supports traditional transactional processing for day-to-day front-office operations or systems that deal directly with the customers. Focuses on organising and simplifying the management of customer information. It uses a database to provide consistent information about a company’s interaction with a customer.

Analytical CRM -supports back-office operations and strategic analysis and includes all systems that do not deal directly with the customers. Analytical CRM uses data mining to provide strategic data about customers. Data mining uses various modelling and analysis techniques to find patterns and relationships to make accurate predictions .

Predictions might include;

}  Which customers to market to

}  Up selling / Cross selling

}  Retaining good customers

1. Describe and differentiate the CRM technologies used by marketing departments and sales departments

Marketing and operational CRM-Marketing departments are able to transform to this new way of doing business by using CRM technologies that allow them gather and analyse customer information to deploy successful marketing campaigns.In fact, a marketing campaigns success is directly proportional to the organisations ability to gather and analyse the right information.The three primary operational CRM technologies a marketing department can implement to increase customer satisfaction are;

-list generator-compile customer information from a variety of sources and segment the information for different marketing campaigns.

-Campaign management systems- guide users through marketing campaign performing such tasks as campaign definition, planning, scheduling, segmentation and success analysis.

-Cross selling-is selling additional products or services to a customer. Up-selling is increasing the value of the sale.

Sales and operational CRM is big business.Salesforce.com is the worldwide leader in on demand customer relationship management services, with over 50 000 customers worldwide – including companies covering many products and services to ‘wow’ customers. The three primary operational CRM technologies a sales department can implement so increase customer satisfaction are;

Sales management CRM systems-automate each phase of the sales process, helping individual sales representatives co-ordinate and organise all of their accounts.

Contact management CRM systems-maintains customer contact information and identifies prospective customers for future sales.

Opportunity management CRM systems- target sales opportunities by finding new customers or companies for future sales.

3.How does CRM help businesses find and retain their most valuable customers?

Analytical CRM data can help businesses find and retain their most valuable customers. Analytical CRM enhances and supports decision making by identifying patterns in customer behaviour that has been collated from various operational CRM systems. Analytic CRM systems aggregate, analysis and disseminate customer information that a organisation can capitalise thereby acquire new customers, improve customer service, and therefore increase customer satisfaction.

Analytical CRM information can assist in:

➢ Giving customers what they want.

➢ Expanding its customer base with new clients.

➢ Finding out what the organisation does best.

➢ Giving the organisation a competitive advantage.

➢ Reactivating inactive customers.

➢ Improving customer service.

4. Describe business intelligence and its value to businesses

Business intelligence (BI) –applications and technologies used to gather, provide access to, and analyze data and information to support decision-making efforts. With the successful implementation of BI systems and organization can expect to receive the following; single point of access to information for all users, bi across organizational departments, up-to-the-minute information for everyone.

Many Businesses are finding that they must identify and meet the fast-changing needs and wants of different customer segments in order to stay competitive in today’s consumer-centric market. BI can tell companies things like;

} Determine who are the best and worst customers thereby gaining insight into where it needs to concentrate more for its future sales

} Identify exceptional sales people

} Determine whether or not campaigns have been successful

} Determine in which activity they are making or losing money.

5. Explain the problem associated with business intelligence. Describe the solution to this business problem

Companies can have a lot of data, however they are not able to benefit from levering this information and turning it into useful data for analytical and strategic decision making.

The issue most organisations are facing today is that it is next to impossible to understand their own strengths and weaknesses, let alone their enemies, because the enormous amount of organisational data is inaccessible to all but the IT department. The problem: data rich, information poor

6.What are two possible outcomes a company could get from using data mining?

Data Mining is the process of analysing data to extract information not offered by the raw data alone. Data mining and also begin at a summary information level and progress through increasing levels to detail (drilling down) or the reverse (drilling up). Two possible outcomes a company could get from using data mining are:

Cluster Analysis - a technique used to divide information set into mutually exclusive groups such that the members of each group are as close together as possible to one another and the different groups are as far apart as possible. Data mining tools that 'understand' human language are finding unexpected applications in medicine.

Association detection - reveals the degree to which variables are related and the nature and frequency of these relationships in the information. One of the most common forms of association detection analysis is market based analysis, which analyses such items as websites and checkout scanner information to detect customers' buying behaviour and predict future behaviour.

Week Ten - Operations Management and Supply Chain

1. Define the term operations management

Operations management (OM) is the management of systems or processes that convert or transform resources (including human resources) into goods and services. Operations management is responsible for managing the core processes used to manufacture goods and produce services.

OM FUNDAMENTALS

1. Explain operations management’s role in business

The scope of OM ranges across the organisation and includes many interrelated activities, such as forecasting, capacity planning, scheduling, managing inventories, assuring quality, motivating employees, deciding where to locate facilities and more. Businesses must use OM to schedule production, deal with components, order parts and materials, schedule and train employees, ensure quality standards are met and above all satisfy the customers. The success of an organisation depends on short and long term planning and the ability of it executives and managers to make informed decisions.

2. Describe the correlation between operations management and information technology

Managers use IT to heavily influence OM decisions including productivity, costs, flexibility, quality, and customer satisfaction. Decision support systems and executive information systems can help an organisation perform what-if analysis, sensitivity analysis, drill-down, and consolidation. Numerous managerial and strategic key decisions are based on OM information systems that affect the entire organisation.

}  Managers use IT to heavily influence OM decisions, including :

}  What: What resources will be needed and in what amounts?

}  When: When should the work be scheduled?

}  Where: Where will the work be performed?

}  How: How will the work be done?

}  Who: Who will perform the work?

 

3. Explain supply chain management and its role in a business

Supply Chain Management (SCM) – involves the management of information flows between and among stages in a supply chain to maximise total supply chain effectiveness and profitability. Today, organisations are quickly realising the tremendous value they can gain from having visibility throughout their supply chain. Knowing immediately what is transacting at the customer end of the supply chain, instead of waiting days or weeks for this information to flow upstream, allows the organisation to react immediately.

The five basic supply chain management components
Plan	This is the strategic portion of supply chain management.A company must have a plan for managing all the resources that go toward meeting customer demand for products or services, A big piece of planning is developing a set of metrics to monitor the supply chain so that it is efficient, cousts less and delivers high quality and value to customers.
Source	Companies must carefully choose reliable suppliers that will deliver goods and services required for making products. Companies must also develop a set of pricing, delivery, and payment processes with suppliers and create metrics for monitoring and improving the relationships.
Make	This is the step where companies manufacture their products or services. This can include scheduling the activities necessary for production, testing, packaging, and preparing for delivery. This is by far the most metric-intensive portion of the supply chain, measuring quality levels, production output and worker productivity.
Deliver	This step is commonly referred to as logisitics.During this step, companies must be able to receive orders from customers, fulfil the orders via a network of warehouses, pick transportation companies to deliver the products, and implement a billing and invoicing system to facilitate payments.
Return	This is typically the most problematic step in the supply chain. Companies must create a network for receiving defective and excess products and support customers who have problems with delivered products.

1. What is the bullwhip effect, and how can it be avoided?

One phenomenon common to supply is the bullwhip effect - where variability in the size and timing of orders increase at each stage up the supply chain, from customer to supplier. The bullwhip effect is a natural dynamic that occurs because of the multistage nature of the supply chain. It is not related to erratic consumer demand. The mis-information regarding a slight rise in demand for a product could cause different members in the supply chain to stockpile inventory. These changes ripple throughout the supply chain magnifying the issue and creating excess inventory and costs. Today, information technology allows additional visibility in the supply chain.  Electronic information flows allow managers to view their suppliers and customers supply chains.

 

1. How does technology assist in supply chain management?

Technology advances have significantly improved companies’ forecasting and business operations. Integrated Systems provide companies with greater visibility over the supply chain inventory levels. IT’s primary role is to create integrations or tight process and information linkages between functions within an organisation.

 

Visibility – more visible models of different ways to do things in the supply chain have emerged.  High visibility in the supply chain is changing industries, as Wal-Mart demonstrated.

Consumer behavior-Companies can respond faster and more effectively to consumer demands through supply chain enhancements

}  Demand planning software – generates demand forecasts using statistical tools and forecasting techniques

Competition- Supply chain planning (SCP) software– uses advanced mathematical algorithms to improve the flow and efficiency of the supply chain. Supply chain execution (SCE) software – automates the different steps and stages of the supply chain.

Speed-

·         Competition often equates to speed

·         Advances in IT are delivering this speed

·         Factors fostering speed:

·         Pleasing customers

·         Need for reducing inventory

·         Strategic planning requirements