1- World-Class supply chain management strategies.

“As the economy changes, as competition becomes more global, it’s no longer company vs. company but supply chain vs. supply chain” Harold Sirkin (VP Boston Consulting Group).

Supply Chain Management (SCM) is the collaborative effort of multiple channel members to design, implement, and manage seamless value-added processes to meet the real needs of the end customer. The development and integration of people and technological resources as well as the coordinated management of materials, information, and financial flows underlie successful supply chain integration.

There are a lot of examples proof the achievements of World-Class manufacturers in SCM. One of the most well-known manufacturers is Procter & Gamble. P&G's net profit margin increased from 6.4% in 1992, when the company initiated a supply chain re-engineering plan, to 9.5% in 1997. Another important example is Unilever with inventory cost cut down by 12%. Unilever has a project which is still going on to cut down this cost more.

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 2- Quality Control Systems and standardization

Quality control and quality engineering are involved in developing systems to ensure products or services are designed and produced to meet or exceed customer requirements. These systems are often developed in conjunction with other business and engineering disciplines using a cross-functional approach.

Many organizations use statistical process control to bring the organization to Six Sigma levels of quality, in other words, so that the likelihood of an unexpected failure is confined to six standard deviations on the normal distribution. This probability is less than four one-millionths. Items controlled often include clerical tasks such as order-entry as well as conventional manufacturing tasks.

Traditional statistical process controls in manufacturing operations usually proceed by randomly sampling and testing a fraction of the output. Variances of critical tolerances are continuously tracked, and manufacturing processes are corrected before bad parts can be produced.
 

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3- Corporate decision making and management systems.

Good decision making is an essential skill for career success generally, and effective leadership particularly. If you can learn to make timely and well-considered decisions, then you can often lead your team to spectacular and well-deserved success. However, if you make poor decisions, your team risks failure and your time as a leader will, most likely, be brutally short.

Decision making is the cognitive process leading to the selection of a course of action among alternatives. Every decision making process produces a final choice. It can be an action or an opinion. It begins when we need to do something but we do not know what. Therefore, decision-making is a reasoning process which can be rational or irrational, and can be based on explicit assumptions or tacit assumptions

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4- Strategic planning

Future success? Or future shock? Only companies that plan ahead will survive the changes in business today and tomorrow. Companies that don’t chart a course will be at the mercy of their customers...and their competitors.

Strategic planning is a management tool. As with any management tool, it is used for one purpose only: to help an organization do a better job - to focus its energy, to ensure that members of the organization are working toward the same goals, to assess and adjust the organization's direction in response to a changing environment.

In short, strategic planning is a disciplined effort to produce fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization is, what it does, and why it does it, with a focus on the future.

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