Lessons learned from TOYOTA

There are several practices that Toyota adopted in Kentucky unit to achieve success such as teamwork, community of fate, job rotation, plant layout, group orientation, and work structure. There are also some practices that they had modified such as promotion based on seniority, lifetime employment, and company unions to fit local needs.
What is most dominant in their organization is the teamwork based on social-technical system (STS) which asserts that everything is dependent on everything else, and they support this strategy in every aspect of their organization. For instance, they developed three layers of teams in their organization. There are working teams that consist of members responsible in production and maintenance, company teams that including all employees of the local operation, and corporate teams comprised by all members of Toyota. In addition, this strategy is obvious in their bonus system in which they give the same reward to all members of a work team based on their outputs to improve spirits of teams.
Another important factor that helps Toyota to achieve this level of success is that they design their organization structure so that they provide an environment of open communication for the staffs. Using a flat structure accompanied by close friendship organizational atmosphere let Toyota's employees to share their knowledge and experience and take them to action in order to increase performance of the whole organization. Good relation between management and employees which is the result of the cited structure together with the omission of private offices, shows its outcome in the relationship ofemployees and customers. In this way they gain a great extent of customer satisfaction that leads to more market share and benefit.
Moreover, their production system and the reliance of Toyota on their employees result in omitting direct supervision and instead concentrating on methods such as processed standardization since they have special tasks for accomplishing every job. And they use output standardization to ensure the quality of their product before it releases. Also using skill standardization provides enough skills for staffs to become familiar with all the production system and special tasks.
One vital element in this company that guarantees their success by going through TPS is that they choose the right people during a long selection process. Since their culture is different from U.S companies they should choose among inexperienced well-educated candidates who may be adaptable with their unique practices. In addition, eliminating physical tasks by automation and using multi-task workforce in order to enrich jobs result in job satisfaction among people. Consequently, Toyota takes advantage of employees' commitment because of their motivations and satisfaction helps it to have a strong team of staffs who believe in the fact that their benefit tight with organization benefits.
Moreover, Toyota uses a decentralized decision making system and give chance to all employees to participate in the process of making decision. This factor strengthens the spirit of teamwork in their organization due to great sense of ownership and membership relative to organization. Also this makes the process of implementing determined decision as quick as possible since all the implementers have a sense of responsibility to complete the decision they have made.
Last but not the least is the style of leadership in Toyota. In fact, this firm's managers use a participative, social-motional style of leadership. They encourage their subordinate to participate in decision making process and are concerned with their welfare and relations. By following this style, indeed, they support teamwork strategy of Toyota.
All the above facts help Toyota to establish TPS with its principals such as JIT, Kanban, Jidoka, and Kaizen in its Unit in Kentucky successfully. A powerful production system accompanied by strong employee commitment that is a result of their structure, hiring system, and their attention to welfare of staffs provide a high performance system for Toyota as a manufacturing company.

Lead Users

Who are Lead Users?

As described by Eric von Hippel from MIT Sloan School of Management, “lead users have two characteristics; first, they have high incentives to solve a problem (their needs) and second, they are the head of the target market and so what they want in the present will be a demand of the market as a whole in the future (as shown in the figure)”. For example, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, needed hypertext and network computers for its own work and that’s why he developed it and now WWW as a result was invented to fulfill the market need as a whole.

Why lead users are important?

Many well known innovative firms are using lead users' innovations as a source for solving challenges in producing new products and services. For example, 3M as one of the greatest innovator firms use them in a method, named Lead User Research Method, to save its declining medical department with new ideas for production. They actually did a great effort to find relative lead users from completely various fields and gather their experiences and innovations in dealing with problems relative to their main challenges in producing new product.
Lead User research method is actually a systematic way for innovation while it keeps enough flexibility for growing innovation. It has four major phases that lead firms to extract market needs and innovative ways of dealing with them in order to develop innovation solutions for meeting that needs. These phases are:
1- Project Planning (takes 4 to 6 weeks)
2- Trends/Needs Identification (takes 5 to 6 weeks)
3- Preliminary Concept Generation (takes 5 to 6 weeks)
4- Final Concept Generation (takes 5 to 6 weeks)

What is a Business Plan?

A business plan is any plan that enables a business to look ahead, allocate resources, focus on key points, and prepare for problems and opportunities. Businesses need business plan to optimize growth and development according to plans and priorities.
This kind of plans usually is written for different purposes. It's important to make your plan match its business purpose. For instance, if you want to submit it to investors or banks you should provide more information about what you are and where your position is in financial terms, but if it has internal purpose you can avoid some detail information about situation of your firm or its market
There is no standard outline for business plans but always take your audience standards into account. Remember that usually cash flow and implementation details are most important parts of every business plan independent from its purpose. But market research depends on objectives. For instance, detail market research is necessary if there is an opportunity to improve the company by learning more about market. (For small group of people that are near to company too much detail isn't necessary)
Reference: HURDLE, a step-by-step guide to creating a thorough, concrete and concise business plan, written by Tim Berry, 2006.

What does a consultant do?

What does a consultant do?
It seems unbelievable to describe a single process for heterogeneous consultancy services in management, but there is. All management consultants follow same five stages procedure in delivering services to their clients.

1. Entry: In this stage first of all consultants experience primitive contact with their clients that has significant role in consulting project since during it they can gain valuable information about customers' problem/opportunity to offer appropriate and acceptable proposal to them. Consultants should have enough preparation before meeting with their clients to be able to go right on the point. Don't forget that signing contract is result of successful entry phase.

2. Diagnosis: In this stage consultants have to analyze purpose and problem in depth in cooperation with their clients. Consequently, they should try to gather fact as much as possible. Remember that consultants just need relevant data and facts to the defined situation in the first and second stage. After gathering facts, consultants should analyze them and give feedback to their clients to check findings with them.

3. Action Planning: In third stage, consultants should try to generate solutions for their customer according to purpose, collected information, and their tacit knowledge and experiences. Then, they should evaluate these alternatives and propose best options to their clients. Consultants also should prepare an implementation plan for selected solutions in this stage.

4. Implementation: In this step, consultants have no executive role unless it was declared in their contracts. They usually assist their clients to get the job done and fix any possible problem in their proposal to improve it toward successful implementation. They, moreover, provide necessary training for their customers to empower them in implementing devised solution.

5. Termination: The last but not the least step is termination. In this step, consultants evaluate results of implemented solution to find any possible deviation from final objectives and take corrective actions. Then they prepare final report to show the process and results of their actions to their clients and reach to mutual commitment with them. Finally, consultants may try to offer future contracts to their customers according to possible problems or opportunities that they have found during their project.

Refrence: Management Consulting - A guide to the profession
Edited by: Milan Kubr

Outsourcing

International business is one of the interesting courses that each MBA student should pass. Our instructor in this course was Dr. Mo Yamin, a very nice guy from Manchester Business School, one of the best business schools all around the world. He assigned us a project to review outsourcing as one of the significant trends in strategies of MNEs (Multinational Enterprises) through a case.
My teammate and me as team A, had decided to go more generally for reasons and challenges of outsourcing, and also provide some mini cases in interesting parts. Here is a brief review of our report:
Through studying many mini cases and literatures, we had found that there are many reasons for MNEs to outsource some parts of their activities. The most important benefits were cost reduction that comes from lower cost of production factors in various places, flexibility that comes from ability to change level of production with no significant cost or investment in response to changing demand, better quality as a result of experience of outsourcee in special field, and focusing on core business due to transferring none-core activities to an external party and making resource free.
But firms should pay attention to the challenges of outsourcing. Psychic distance among different countries, time differences, conflicting objectives, matter of security, intellectual property, controlling quality, and so many other factors should be considered during these kinds of projects.
It's generally suggested that firms outsource non-core activities to keep their competitive advantages and know-how, but they should pay attention to their brand name as an umbrella on all their internal and external activities.
We had found many success and failure cases. If you want know more about these cases and complete results of our project don't hesitate to contact me through my mail.

Amin from Team A

HRIS form System Group

Today, I was attending in a meeting with a guy from System Group about SG's new Human Resource Information System (HRIS). It was a software based on .net and it seems that designers had considered every possible action that a human resource expert may want to do by use of a HRIS. This software consists of thirteen modules. Some of the important components are Recruitment, Performance Appraisal, and Organizational structure. I believe that it really can solve many existing problems in Iranian organization and help them to use their data and create procedures to increase performance.

But remember that this software need exact and appropriate inputs from human resource experts such as Job Description and Job Specification, appraisal forms, and training evaluation forms.

I highly recommend all MBA students to experience this software in SG.