Supply Chain Management - Benchmarking Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Supply Chain Management - Benchmarking - Essay Example Coca-Cola Amatil Company (CCA) is the largest soft drink bottler in Australia. Its headquarters is at Sydney and it supplies to a host of countries in the Asia-Pacific region. In Australia, where it has a 60 percent share of the soft drink market, Coca-Cola Amatil has eight manufacturing and more than 70 distribution sites, each with different products and distribution requirements. It requires several suppliers across many countries to supply various products that go into manufacture of its soft drinks and juices. The presentation covers the need and importance of Supply Chain Management (SCM) for the company. Purchase is the foundation of making an effective Supply Chain. A good purchase will often result in better margins. Organizations have specialist purchase departments. They are informed of the requirements and in turn they organize purchases according to previously laid down policies of the organization or company. Larger organization may have more than one purchasers or even a group of people making purchase decisions. Since there are individuals who finally make decisions their judgment, whether individually or in groups, are influenced by the environment they work in. Kohli (1989) proposed that influence is a function of personal resources or power. Every person has a demographic background that largely consists of his personal resources comprising mainly of ethics and education. His decision is influence by these. The status hierarchy determines the level of power but that can be moderated by the influence of the size, similarity and cohesiveness of the group he works in and th e risk, time and pressure of the situation. These factors when combined influence behaviour in purchase decisions. Sheth (1973) maintains that the psychological world of the decision makers affects purchasing behaviour. This will include the special

Human Resource Management Models Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Human Resource Management Models - Essay Example The soft approach appears to be the better option considering the human ability to change and adapt, but as we will see, it cannot be used alone to manage human resources. We need to integrate approaches and find a multidisciplinary approach to dealing with people. How much of people management depends on theory and how much cannot be measured "In theory, practice and in the workplace experience, though people appear to be of central concern, the rich, warm, unpredictable face of humanity are all too clearly absent." Perhaps the most difficult question to answer is whether people are better lead or managed. Do people respond better when encouraged by a leader or when they are managed To begin with, it is necessary to understand what human resource management is and how it works. Every business runs on resources and the one resource that it cannot function without, is its staff. Human resource management is therefore about getting the most out of staff members (Human Resource Management Guide). Human resource management also, however, includes deciding which individuals are better suited to which position as well as conducting sufficient research to determine the best placement of individuals (McNamara 2008). We can now determine what has to be done with regards to human resource management, but there are two ways of going about this: we can either look at the humanistic approach or at the objective 'hard' approach. ... Two schools of thought were developed with hard and soft theories in mind: Harvard and Michigan. Harvard follows the soft model more closely while Michigan is based on the soft model. The normative model seeks to consolidate both the strategic management of the business as well as the interpretive model which is considered soft (Gill: 3). The problem here is that according to Gill (1999) "there are problems in the integration of HRM policy with business strategy and evidence indicates that HRM is more ad hoc than strategic."(Gill 1999: 3). In this case, one cannot assume that what is good for he business is necessarily good for the employee (Gill 1999: 3). The hard model would therefore focus on the employee as a resource, assuming that whatever causes the business to soar, will automatically uplift the employee (Gill 1999: 4). The intuitive problem is that humans are not controllable and they are not constant. Human's cannot be 'paid off' or compensated with more pay without regarding emotions or feelings even though this is a simple solution to a complex issue. In Gill and Meyer (2007) it was ascertained that outsourcing of certain business portions yielded dramatic results (Gill and Meyer 2007: 4). These results were not necessarily good ones, in the sense that businesses no longer had to employ people to do the jobs they could outsource, leading to job-losses and retrenchment. Despite this, there has to be an increase in individual 'soft' model relationships with employees if the employee numbers are smaller (Gill and Meyer 2007: 4-5). According to Gill and Meyer too, human resource management has to "manage the simultaneous pursu it of soft and