Masters in Business Management

Question: What is the procedure of benchmarking a business? Answer: Petuskiene and Glinskiene (2015) have stated that benchmarking a business is a procedure of measuring the performance against similar-sized business in the operating industry. It can be stated that the benchmarking provides essential information regarding how an organization can enhance the overall business. Therefore, it can be opined that benchmarking is a dimension of the superiority of the company rules, products, approaches and programs along with their strong contrast with the standard dimensions or comparable measurements of its peers. Rolstadas (2012) has mentioned the objectives of the benchmarking and the first one is to decide what and where the developments are called for and secondly to investigate how other companies accomplish their elevated performance levels. Most importantly, benchmarking is largely used to use this information in order to enhance performance. Zhu (2014) has mentioned in his research work that benchmarking is one of the procedures of recognizing the best practices in sole relation to both the product as well as the processes by which those products are created and delivered. In this part, it can be stated that the application of benchmarking takes into account four major keys steps and these are like thoughtful in detail existing commerce procedure and then evaluating the industry procedures of others. The third step takes into account comparing own business presentation with that of others analyzed and the last step focuses on implementing the steps necessary to close the performance gap. Therefore, it can be stated that all the companies are required to focus on benchmarking, as this enhances the performance by recognizing as well as applying the best demonstrated practices to the operations and the sales (Productivity Commission 2012). Rolstadas (2013) has stated that Six Sigma is an inclusive as well as elastic scheme for attaining, supporting as well as improving the business success. It can be stated that the six sigma model is exclusively determined by a close understanding of the consumer requirements, regulation use of the facts, statistics as well as statistical analysis and industrious attention towards managing, improving as well as reinventing the entire business procedure. Therefore, it can be stated that the Six Sigma procedure is based on the notion that procedure difference can be reduced utilizing the statistical tools. Apart from discussing this Six Sigma, it can be stated that it is required to focus on lean as well because this is the major part of this methodology. It can be stated that lean is a set of tools developed in order to reduce the waste connected with the flow of the resources as well as information in a well-designed process from beginning towards the end. However, it can be stated th at the objective of lean is to recognize and eliminate the non-essential and non-valued added steps in the business procedure in order to streamline production, enhance quality as well as increase consumer faithfulness (Hong et al. 2012). Bruneel et al. (2012) have argued that Lean methods can be employed inside the DMAIC structure to supplement Six Sigma apparatus when the projects concentration is to enhance process speed and competence. Therefore, in a nutshell, it can be stated that the Lean Six Sigma is a proper combination of the two influential procedure enhancement techniques and these are lean and Six Sigma. After analyzing the nature of the Lean Six Sigma, it can be stated that Lean Six Sigma methodology is one of the effective and integrated approach to the business problem solving. It can be seen that the Lean and Six Sigma model is useful for the companies in order to achieve the breakthroughs in the quality and the cost reduction. It is helpful in reducing as well eliminating time-based inefficiencies in the transactional processes. It is beneficial in achieving both the bottom line and the soft cost savings. It is required to communicate the worth of the Lean Six Sigma procedure developments to put on buy-in from the higher administration and the employees. Moreover, it has been seen that used Lean and Six Sigma model helps the organizations to overcome the barriers to process optimization (Mousa 2013). Research works have stated that Lean Six Sigma is generally intended to enhance the superiority of the procedure outputs by searching and eliminating the reasons of mistakes and the difference inside the existing commerce procedure, especially in the manufacturing and the commerce divisions. Therefore, it can be stated that this allows the businesses to make sure proper efficiency in their procedures, decrease cycle times and enhance customer service. This particular approach has two major points. The first one is delighting the customers with speed and quality. The other one in this part is improving the entire business process flow and speeds (Hilton and Sohal 2012). Antony et al. (2012) have mentioned in his research work that lean is a production procedure with the major principle of protecting worth with less work. Therefore, it can be stated that operations that fall short to generate worth for the end customer are estimated extravagant. Eliminating waste and surplus procedures reduce the entire creation time of the company and the overall costs. It can be stated that the strengths of lean is its fast accomplishment and the immediate benefits related to the productivity, reduction of error along with customer lead times. In case of the small and the big organizations, long-standing benefits count enhancements to the financial performance along with the customer satisfaction and morale of the employees. Besides lean, Six Sigma concentrates on defects from variation. Many leading and the successful companies like Motorola uses Six Sigma model (Pyzdek and Keller 2014). Additionally, it can be stated that Six Sigma model is one of the powerful techniques for searching the main reasons of the imperfections. Motorola has developed realistic ways to utilize this hypothesis of Six Sigma for achieving 10-fold improvement in quality, cost and the services in the five years. Six Sigma is an association arrangement for the overall and the continuous improvement that takes into account Champions, Black Belts and the Green Belts. Properly mixed with a focus on emphasizing projects based on the financial and the customer impact, Six Sigma can easily convert a culture through incessant enhancement (Fadly Habidin and Mohd Yusof 2013). It can be stated that in the recent years, most of the big companies have been successfully using Six Sigma Methodology in order to decrease the overall mistakes along with extreme cycle times, disorganized procedures and the overruns of costs connected to the monetary reporting schemes. In this part, focus would be shed on a case study that is related to the ongoing Account Reconciliation Enhancement Project conducted by the finance subdivision of a main U.S. defense supplier. The major aim of the scheme was to rationalize as well as stabilize the establishment and the upholding of costing and planning for all business activities within the present financial management procedure. The Six Sigma accomplishment resulted in an important lessening in the standard cycle time and cost, per unit of movement and required to manufacture the requisite economic reports (Assarlind et al. 2013). Reports state the fact that in the year 1987, Motorola was one of the leading companies that developed and prearranged the particular Six Sigma development Methodology to gain the world class presentation along with entire consumer satisfaction and quality. From that specified time, it can be seen that minimum 25% of the Fortune 200, counting Motorola, General Electric, Boeing, Ford, Toyota, Kodak. Bank of America and some other leading organizations implemented a Six Sigma Program. After implementing this model in the organizational procedure, most of these companies claimed that this model significantly enhanced the overall profitability of the organization. For example, it can be stated the General Electric in the year 1998, claimed the reimbursement of $1.2 billion and the costs of $450 million, for their net benefits of $750 million. Like General Electric, Allied Signal as well reported that the Six Sigma model has reported that this has been one of the major factors in reaching the cost of $1.5 billion in the predictable investments. Six Sigma has as well facilitated Honeywell to decrease the expansion time requisite to the design Web sites by 84% for its specialty resources (Manville et al. 2012). However, Habidin and Yusof (2012) have stated that the Six Sigma has been defined as one of the effective management strategy for enhancing the product and the process quality. On the other hand, some have stated the fact that it is a numerical term mostly used to measure the process variations and this model works to systematically manage the variations and at the same time eliminate the defects. It is required to mention that practical prop up places like economics, bookkeeping, human resources, marketing, procurement as well as trade have not kept proper pace with the manufacturing in implementing the Six Sigma agendas. After implementing this model in the business process, it can be stated that near about 14% of the public dealing companies have inefficient interior controls that results in output errors, inefficient process and the cost overruns (De Mast and Lokkerbol 2012). The research paper has stated that the Six Sigma is used in the Sales and Marketing and Accounting and Finance and the result is positive enough in this regards. However, it can be stated that most of the research works have tried to assess the impact of Six Sigma on the overall financial performance that have taken place at the aggregate industry level of analyzes. But in reality, it can be seen that very few actual cases have been reported of the impact of Six Sigma on the finance process itself (De Mast and Lokkerbol 2012). At the core of the Six Sigma Model, there exist a model named DMAIC and these are Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control. It can be stated that each of the DMAIC phases has clear objectives as well as tasks along with the proven techniques. From several reports, it has already been found that Six Sigma model originated from Motorola and after that, several companies adopted this model called General Electric. In this part focus would be shed on implementing Six Sigma in the small scale businesses. The company was plagued with declining productivity and to deal with the situation carefully, the management of the company used the DMAIC model that divided the project in the following parts (Habidin and Yusof 2012). The define phrase is self-explanatory and in this phase, the project team created a process map and SIPOC diagram, i.e. Supplier, Input, Process, Output and Consumers for the bushing manufacturing process. The next stage, which is the Measure phrase, the management team of the company gathers data regarding the process. This procedure is not as much straightforward as it looks though. Initially, the management of the corporation required to ensure that one can trust the fetched data by conducting a measurement system analysis. After this Measure phase, comes the Analysis phase and the responsible team then applied a variety of data analysis instruments, utilizing Minitab Statistical Software. For that, firstly, it is required to conduct a process capability analysis and the other effective tool is Z.bench score. At the time of incorporating this model, it is necessary enough to understand the culture of the organization. It is required to analyze that the employees in the organizatio n are whether individualistic or collaborative (Assarlind et al. 2013). Apart from that, it is necessary to gain more clarity with the software tools, as the homegrown or something like Minitab helps a company to analyze the graphs challenges statistically. Some have advised that it is required to commit the necessary times, staffs and the resources. In order to do that, the company is required to point a person inside the organization who has a specified strategic viewpoint on the concerned business. Above all, it can be stated that focus must be on the customers, as any improvement process is designed to enhance the customer satisfaction (Rolstadas 2012). Based on the benchmark, the company is required to focus on incorporating the Lean Six Sigma Model for the overall enhancement of the business process. References Antony, J., Krishan, N., Cullen, D. and Kumar, M., 2012. 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