Information Technology and Business Alignment: Why it is Important
Introduction: What is IT Business Alignment and Why it is Important The saying about the Blind Men and the Elephant in which three blind men touch the Elephant and state different things without knowing that it is an Elephant, firms and organizations must ensure that their IT and business strategies are complementary and supplementary to […]
What’s Behind the Big Tech Meltdown? Is It a Temporary Blip or a Longer Term Reckoning?
Anything That Goes Up Has To Come Down! The Big Tech Meltdown and Its Causes and Consequences Once considered the “darling” of stock markets and the world in general, it does look like the “party’s over” for Big Tech firms! From Tesla to Twitter, and from Meta to Microsoft, with Amazon and Google following suit, […]
How to Use a Fishbone Diagram
The fishbone diagram, which also goes by a couple of other names like the Cause and effect diagram and the Ishikawa diagram is one of the seven basic tools of quality management. It has wide ranging applications in almost all six sigma projects. The Fishbone diagram is a simple but highly effective tool in problem […]
Quality – A Tool for Achieving Excellence
Introduction For an organization to be successful it is of paramount importance to exceed the customer expectations as to generate customer delight. One of the best ways of doing this is by providing quality products and services. In technical language, quality means to a product adhering to the specifications. For customer probably meeting or exceeding […]
Types of Licenses in International Trade
International Trade has become the order of the day in the current environment of Globalization. The nature of economies namely under developed, developing and developed countries as well as the availability of natural resources, labor, technology and capital required for production etc play a important role in countries economy as well as its reliance on […]
Managing businesses in highly competitive environment and in global scenario is highly complicated. What has made the global giants like IBM, HP, Dell, CISCO, GE, DHL, Fedex and many more companies hugely successful is the fact that they have built their Organizations on standard business processes that are refined and fine tuned to each local country requirements.
Business process and Organizational design have provided them with the ability not only to control global operations but more importantly to provide the same superior quality and commitment as well as service to the customers all across the world. This is essentially the differentiating factor that makes a Dell or an IBM stand apart from the rest of the competition.
In order to offer complete control over the product and service to its customers, IBM used to manage the service support in house globally.
In recent times of course, IBM sold its Laptop and Desktop business to Lenovo and outsourced the entire service business to Geodis Logistics. However IBM has ensured that the business processes and controls are retained and interfaced with its functional units.
This outsourcing of the parts management, delivery and service has been possible only because the entire function is defined, managed and controlled via specific business processes. IBM has not only devised detailed business processes to manage its business operations, but spends an equal amount of time and focus on auditing the business processes to ensure the process is followed, the processes are valid and the business risks arising out of process failures are identified and managed.
Continuously the Organization evaluates its processes, removes redundancy and keeps strengthening the business processes in line with the changes in its business.
Understanding how the business processes and business functions are organized in such a set up validates the significance of the business process to the Organization. Though the departments are managed by functional managers, the functions related to a particular business report to the Business Unit head.
Thus the business unit has sales as well as service functions reporting into the head. The service unit involves the technical service engineers, the sales support staff, the parts distribution managers forming one unit to service the business unit. In addition, each of these functions would be managed by and reporting to each functional head such as Head of Service Delivery, Technical Solutions Head as well as Inventory and Logistics Manager etc.
The Organizational design includes horizontal work flow with vertical staffing structure. It is the Business Process and systems that ensure smooth and seamless overlapping, integration and optimization of the functions and aligning all groups on dual reporting system and ensuring that every function is focused on the end customer.
The service parts managers are functionally responsible for procurement, inventory and logistics of the service parts components. Overriding this functional expertise is the need for the Parts Managers to be in line with the local Customer needs, the local Country situation, the Customer criticality and field support requirements and plan his function accordingly.
When Customer fulfillment becomes the primary objective even for the inventory controller and the Parts service group, every single function in the Organization gears up to work together with the single aim of servicing the customer. When this happens at a Organizational and global level, the Organization naturally becomes a global leader.
Managing global markets, different countries, different types of customers, providing superior quality and service reliability to every single customer consistently and sourcing millions of parts from across the globe, managing multiple production bases, managing innovation and product quality besides managing thousands of employees and managing the changes both internally and externally to emerge as global leaders has been made possible due to the Organizational design and functioning depending upon on Business processes and systems to manage the business operations.
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