Easter Foods in the UK - Case Study Example

Eastern foods in the UK By Business of Easter Foods in UK Introduction Many businesses face a myriad of challenges when getting into new markets and Eastern Foods is no exception to this situation. The management team at Eastern Foods should expect various challenges with regard to human resource management, accounting, marketing, and operations management as the company attempts to establish its operations in the UK. This report highlights the challenges that Eastern Foods Company expects to find while entering the UK market. Equally, the report shall offer some recommendations on how the company can overcome these challenges. HRM Challenges According to (Simons 2011), four fundamental issues present challenges in the management of a company’s human resources. The manager cannot directly control issues such as productivity, job satisfaction, turnover, and absenteeism. Hashim & Hameed (2012) further point out that productivity refers to the amount of output that a company will get for every unit of input. Job satisfaction refers to the feeling of well-being that an individual will experience in his/her job. It relates to whether the individual likes the job and the immediate surrounding environment at work. The other issue is turnover, and this refers to the permanent loss of employees from the organization. Turnover is a major challenge that can cost the company a lot (Losey 2005). Finally, absenteeism, the failure of workers to report to the workplace as scheduled, will be another challenge for Eastern Foods. Similarly, absenteeism costs the organization money in terms of lost productivity (Hashim & Hameed 2012). Accounting Challenges On equal measure, Eastern Foods Company should expect challenges related to the accounting function within the organization. According to IFAC (2011), significant societal and macroeconomic challenges are forcing companies to seek more sustainable value creation, while considering both the need for being compliant and the need to retain competitiveness in a global economy. Sustainable economies are dependent on the success of firms in directing their operations and strategies to gain sustainable economic, social, and environmental performance. This entails the integration of sustainability factors into the company’s operations, strategy, and reporting. Executives deal with two challenges as they attempt to develop sustainable organizations and adopt the value of long-term thinking. Firstly, the need for resilience and short-term results can be a distractor towards the manager’s long-term vision. The second challenge is that defining the long-term vision and incorporating it into the daily operations in a way that is meaningful can be difficult (IFAC 2011). Marketing Challenges Eastern Foods should anticipate for marketing challenges as the company enters into the UK market. The current times indicate significant societal changes and the numerous technological breakthroughs that are central in driving them have created a wide range of opportunities, demands, and challenges on the marketing function. In such a rapidly changing environment, the number of buttons that must be pushed to reach the customer is rapidly increasing. Technology has helped to boost this expansion and open new avenues for expanding marketing’s ability to exploit the opportunities in a more effective and creative manner than before. This has enabled a better understanding of what customers expect in, and how they interact with, a brand, giving the organization deeper insights into ways to better use the relationship to create growth for the business. However, the challenge is on marketing to reason more strategically with respect to these changes and how to link the ‘art and science’ of the task more effectively. The challenge concerns ways of demonstrating the relevance of marketing and expanding its role beyond its traditional boundaries. Finally, marketing should be concerned with how it can quantifiably contribute to the long-term success of the organization (Davis 2006). Operations Management Challenges The key challenge that Eastern Foods will expect in relation to operations management is the practical application of operations management principles, theories, ideas, techniques, and processes. Despite the fact that operations managers may understand these principles, ideas, theories, techniques, and processes, the real world scenario is too complex than we expect. Moreover, the variables of change are becoming more uncontrollable as the unplanned changes create a paradox for organizational managers and leaders seeking to balance process and strategy (Burke 2005). Thus, the context in which the application of techniques and processes within operations management takes place can present as much of a challenge as the techniques and processes. Furthermore, the type and nature of business activity and outputs will present challenges and limitations in applying what exists in literature and practice as effective operations management principles for improving performance and quality or increasing value to a business (McFarlane 2014). Key Issue 1: Vital Principles and Theories for Practicing Operations Managers There are various important principles and theories that managers and business owners must consider in their general approach and overall philosophy toward operations management. These principles and theories will serve to guide managers’ underlying decisions and processes in enhancing and creating value and quality for customer satisfaction and to ensure success of the organization. They represent embodiment of practices and ideas that exists in operations management literature and common principles and practices that govern value as well as quality improvement procedures in organizations nowadays (McFarlane 2014). Among these principles and theories, total quality management (TQM) is the most enduring in organizational value practices. Similarly, benchmarking is a process of improving quality that has its origins in manufacturing but it is applicable to services as well. Six Sigma principles refer to a growing body of principles and knowledge designed to minimize variability and defects in products and services to improve quality (McFarlane 2014). For the purposes of this report, we shall explore total quality management principles and discuss how they are applicable to Eastern Foods. For a long time, Total Quality Management (TQM) has been advanced as the most organizationally salient philosophical process to quality improvement that involves people, systems, and processes in efficiently and effectively using resources to improve quality and create value. The philosophy of TQM focuses on three principles for attaining high quality and performance levels. These principles are customer satisfaction, employee involvement, and continuous performance improvement (Krajewski, Ritzman & Malhorta, 2013). The management at Eastern Foods will therefore have to deal with the challenge of ensuring their customers are satisfied, their employees are involved, and there is continuous improvement in performance. In addition, Organizations that employ TQM should emphasize on product and service design, using good benchmarking processes and purchasing strategies, process design, and the application of problem solving tools. The organization must satisfy both external and internal customers by meeting their expectations. This means concentrating on value, conforming to specifications, providing customer support, and developing positive psychological impressions by providing quality products. In order for TQM to effectively work in performance and quality improvement, all employees have to be involved and the operations managers must do a good job of serving the organization’s internal customers (Krajewski et al 2013). The operations managers of the organization have to empower employees to serve customers and make important decisions that contribute towards improving quality and adding value in creating and providing products. The managers should engage teams effectively, particularly quality circles or problem solving teams, as well as special teams and self-managed teams to handle various challenges and operational issues (McFarlane 2014). With respect to continuous improvement, in the application of TQM, a vital tool is the Deming Cycle or the PDCA. PDCA stands for Plan, Do, Check, and Act. This implies that operations managers have to plan processes, implement the plans and monitor the activities or processes, analyse the data they collect regarding the activities or processes, and act according to what the results dictate (Haizer & Render 2011). With regard to the issue of operations management, it is evident that the operations managers of Eastern Foods will have to deal with the challenge of implementing appropriate or suitable TQM principles and theories. This shall be very important if the company wants to create value for its customers and enhance the quality of their products. The managers of the company will have to face the challenge of ensuring its internal customers are satisfied as well. Additionally, the managers have to utilize various simple tools for process analysis to evaluate the processes within the company that create goods in order to ensure that quality is present and there is value addition. Key Issue 2: Accounting and Sustainable Organizational Success In business, professional accountants have various abilities and skills to help the organization deal with current challenges. They can assist the organization’s top managers to make sure that their strategies effectively link short-term actions with long-term goals, and with the main drivers of sustainable success. The key issue for a company like Eastern Foods is the need for resilience and short-term results. This can distract the company’s managers from their long-term aspirations. Another related issue is that defining the long-term vision and incorporating it into the daily operations of the company in a way that is meaningful can be complicated. These issues present challenges for the company’s executives as they adopt the value of long-term thinking and attempt to create a sustainable organization (IFAC, 2011). To support the accountancy profession in responding to changing expectations of organizations, financial markets, and the society, there are eight drivers of sustainable organizational success. The eight drivers draw from different quality and management frameworks and they offer a basis for gaining an understanding of how professional accounting can support an organization to achieve value creation in a sustainable fashion. These drivers can be used to develop vital areas of competency for accountants to better facilitate sustainable success in organizations (IFAC, 2011). The drivers of sustainable organizational success include customer and stakeholder focus, effective strategy and leadership, integrated governance, risk, and control, adaptability and innovation, financial management, people and talent management, operational excellence, and effective and transparent communication (IFAC, 2011). With respect to customer and stakeholder focus, this driver of sustainable organizational success concerns the management’s ability to understand and satisfy customer needs or service-user needs. Effective leadership and strategy concerns the management’s ability to provide strategic and ethical leadership that will focus on sustainable value creation. This issue is concerned with management’s ability to facilitate crucial performance drivers, including ethical culture, organizational processes and structures, and strong corporate values. In terms of integrated governance, risk and control, this sustainability driver relates to management’s ability to deploy effective governance processes and structures with internal control and integrated risk management. In addition, it deals with management’s ability to strike a balance between performance and conformity in governance. The fourth driver of sustainable success is innovation and adaptability. It involves the organization’s ability to innovate products and processes to enhance performance and reputation of the organization. Furthermore, it deals with adapting the company to changing circumstances. Financial management is the other driver of sustainable success and it involves ensuring that financial leadership and overall organizational strategy support the creation of value. Financial management is concerned with the implementation of good practices in areas like managing working capital, treasury and tax, and profitability and cost improvement. People and talent management involves considering talent management and enabling employees as strategic functions within an organization. It entails applying talent management to the finance function so that it can better serve the needs of the greater organization. Operational excellence involves aligning the allocation of resources with the strategic objectives of the organization and the drivers of stakeholder and shareholder value. Additionally, Operational excellence deals with supporting decision making through insightful and timely performance analysis. Finally, effective and transparent communication is also a key driver of sustainable organizational success. Effective and transparent communication involves effectively engaging stakeholders to ensure that they get relevant communications. In addition, it involves the preparation of high-quality business reports to support the understanding and decision making role of the organization’s stakeholders (IFAC, 2011). Recommendations In order to overcome the challenges facing Eastern Foods, this report proposes a number of recommendations. Concerning the HRM challenges that Eastern Foods may face, the company should consider developing a HRM policy that will factor in issues such as remuneration and employee welfare, workplace environment, training and development. This will help the organization to have a clear policy and strategy on employee recruitment, retention, training and development. Eastern Foods can overcome the challenges related to accounting by adopting a wider long-term focus that incorporates environmental and social performance with financial performance in order to help in achieving sustainable organizational success. Incorporating the eight drivers of sustainable organizational success in the company’s overall strategy will also help the company have a sound financial and accounting strategy. The company can overcome the marketing challenges it may face by adopting a customer-centric view of its marketing strategies. The company should build strong brands that are critical for the business to grow and build it based on actual customer experiences with the brand along with the messaging surrounding the brand. This does not mean that the company should ignore traditional communication strategies or tactics. It means that the company should attempt to adjust its marketing approaches by working closely with other non-marketing touch-points to make sure that the customers’ relationships with the brands are solid. In order for the company to capture and gain the most benefits from the opportunities that are present in the environment, it must maintain market superiority, strive to achieve more with fewer resources, and manage increasingly complex consumer behaviours. In order to overcome the challenges relating to operations management, the company should find ways and develop processes that are based on commonly practiced operations management principles and theories, and marry these with the organizations unique circumstances so that it can achieve quality and create value for customers. References Burke, W. W. 2005. Organization change: Theory and practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Davis, S. 2006. New Challenges to Marketing’s Mandates. World Advertising Research Centre. Focus Brand Growth. Available from: http://www.prophet.com/downloads/articles/Marketing_role_in_growth.pdf Hashim, M. & Hameed, F. 2012. Human Resource Management in the 21st Century: Issues & Challenges & Possible Solutions to Attain Competitiveness. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences. Vol. 2, No. 9. Heizer, J., & Render, B. 2011. Operations Management, 10th Edition. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) 2011. Competent and Versatile: How Professional Accountants in Business Drive Sustainable Organizational Success. Available at: http://www.cica.ca/focus-on-practice-areas/finance-and-management/item65652.pdf Krajewski, L.J., Ritzman, L.P., & Malhotra, M.K. 2013. Operations Management: Processes and Supply Chains, 10th Edition. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc., Prentice Hall. Losey, M. 2005. Future of Human Resource Management: 64 thought leaders explore the Critical HR issues of today and tomorrow. John Wiley & sons USA Inc. McFarlane, D. A. 2014. The Challenges of Operations Management for Business Managers. International Journal of Operations and Logistics Mnagement. Vol. 3 1 (16-29). Simons, R. (2011) Human Resource Management: Issues, Challenges and Opportunities. Forida. CRC Press. Read More