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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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Overcoming The Barriers to Supply Chain Integration

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Traditional organisations have grown heavy with layer upon layer of management and bureaucracy.
The purpose of the logistics vision statement is to give a clear indication of the basis on which the business intends to build a position of advantage through closer customer relationships. Such statements are never easy to construct. There is always the danger that they will descend into vague ‘motherhood’ statements that give everyone a warm feeling but provide no guidelines for action.
Amongst experienced observers and commentators of the logistics management process there is general agreement that the major barrier to the implementation of the logistics concept is organisational. In other words, a major impediment to change in this crucial managerial area is the entrenched and rigid organisational structure that most established companies are burdened with.
As markets, technologies and competitive forces change at ever increasing rates the imperative for organisational change becomes more pressing.
The trend towards globalisation of industry, involving as it does the coordination of complex flows of materials and information from a multitude of offshore sources and manufacturing plants to a diversity of markets, has sharply highlighted the inappropriateness of existing structures. What we are discovering is that the driving force for organisational change is logistics.
The intense level of competitive activity encountered in most markets has led to a new emphasis on measuring performance not just in absolute terms, but rather in terms relative to the competition, and beyond that to ‘best practice’.

 

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