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MANAGING PROJECTS

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Projects represent nonroutine business activities that often have long-term strategic ramifications for a firm. In this chapter, we examined how projects differ from routine business activities and discussed the major phases of projects. We noted how environmental changes have resulted in increased attention being paid to projects and project management over the past decade. In the second half of the chapter, we introduced some basic tools that businesses can use when planning for and controlling projects. Both Gantt charts and network diagrams give managers a visual picture of how a project is going. Network diagrams have the added advantage of showing the precedence between activities, as well as the critical path(s). We wrapped up the chapter by showing how these concepts are embedded in inexpensive yet powerful software packages such as Microsoft Project. If you want to learn more about project management, we encourage you to take a look at the Web site for the Proj...
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Managing The Global Pipeline

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The trend towards global organisation of both manufacturing and marketing is highlighting the critical importance of logistics and supply chain management as the keys to profitability.
Three of the ways in which businesses have sought to implement their global logistics strategies have been through focused factories, centralised inventories and postponement.
Although the trend to global brands and products continues, it should be recognised that there are still significant local differences in customer and consumer requirements.
One of the features of global pipelines is that there is often a higher level of uncertainty about the status of a shipment whilst in transit. This uncertainty is made worse by the many stages in a typical global pipeline as a product flows from factory to port, from the port to its country of destination, through customs clearance and so on until it finally reaches the point where it is required. Not surprisingly there is a high degree of variation in these extended pipelines.
If the potential trade-offs in rationalising sourcing, production and distribution across national boundaries are to be achieved then it is essential that a central decision-making structure for logistics is established.
The implementation of global pipeline control is highly dependent upon the ability of the organisation to find the correct balance between central control and local management. It is unwise to be too prescriptive but the experience that global organisations are gaining every day suggests that certain tasks and functions lend themselves to central control and others to local management.
One of the most pronounced trends of recent decades has been the move to offshore sourcing, often motivated by the opportunity to make or buy products or materials at significantly lower prices than could be obtained locally.

 

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