Organizational Controls Essay Example for Free

Organizational Controls Essay The case describes one of the most common problems that arise in cross-cultural business expansions without accounting for cultural and social differences across borders. Lincoln is a well established company with a great concurrent control system which enables it to move swiftly through processes and end up with phenomenal figures of efficiency and productivity. The control system at Lincoln is concurrent, although it can be argued that the system has certain similarities with the feed-forward control system. However, one thing is certain: the system is quick and flexible to change quickly which does not consist of the slowness of the feedback system. In particular such a system along with the different types of reward schemes makes Lincoln highly successful in the United States. It would be really difficult to find an organization comparable to Lincoln in terms of the amounts and kinds of rewards given to its employees. The different employee rewarding schemes are all tools and techniques which Lincoln has adapted to over the years because of the realization of the fact that employees in the US are highly motivated through pay-based rewards. (Susan Meredith, 2004) Essentially speaking it is this single factor which has contributed largely to the success of Lincoln in the US and the different kinds of pay-based rewards only seek to satisfy all kinds of people with different ideas and expectations for pay-based rewards. It should be understood by the management of Lincoln when they are transporting the US approach to other cultures that the cultures of different nations maybe and probably are entirely different from the American culture. It is not necessary that the same kinds of objects and pay-based rewards may drive them and motivate them towards high productivity. There are a lot of other intrinsic rewards available at the disposal of managers to use to meet the demands of the workforce. The same types of rewards may not work on different cultures due to the social and political circumstances of those nations. Employees may have different needs, which if met by the management, will motivate them to work harder and achieve levels of high productivity and efficiency. (Daft, 2001) The problem made by the management at Lincoln was to generalize that fact that pay-based and other monetary rewards will definitely motivate employees to achieve high productivity and efficiency. Instead, the operations failed due to the different cultures having different motivational factors, which obviously were not identified by the Lincoln management. The suggestion here to be followed by the management is to identify through research and internal mingling the factors that affect motivation and job satisfaction amongst the different cultures in which they have expanded their operations to and address specifically those issues to reap the same results as in the US. (Robbins, 2004) Employees would maintain their relationship and confidence in Lincoln only if the organization upholds it’s the expectations the employees and their unions hold from them. If Lincoln is unable to pay its US workers the bonus they deserve, Lincoln will be in deep trouble. The overall situation would go from bad to worse. It should be understood that the US employees had no share or tear in Lincoln’s expansions and that the losses arising as a result of the bad policies implemented in the new acquisitions was not transferable onto the US employees. Thus, Lincoln should not dishearten the US employees or risk the deterioration of employee satisfaction, morale and motivation which will affect Lincoln negatively in a significant manner. (Robbins, 2004) Therefore, I believe that Lincoln should borrow money to pay its US workers the bonus they actually deserve to take no risks in losing potential employees to its competitors or risk the loss of employee boost and motivation due to a break in expected promises.

Industrial Revolution :: British History

Britain was the perfect country to start the Industrial Revolution due to three factors. Britain had the natural resources of coal and iron. Coal was used for energy and iron was used for building the new machines. They also had surplus labor, which gave jobs to farmers, because of the Agricultural Revolution, which was led to farmers loosing their jobs. Britain had also had a lot of infrastructure, such as laws and in stable government, which helped with industrialization. Roads, ports and bridges played an important role in developing an industrialized nation.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚     Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Some causes and effects of the industrial revolution, which also considered positive and negative effects of the Industrial revolution. Positive effects were the agricultural revolution meant more employment; Empires provided markets in which the price went down. There were also inventions, such as the steam engine; with this invention and more Britains economics were boosted. Negative effects were that natural resources led to urban squalor (when the city spread out and it was all a mess there was no organization). Enclosure act, which made urban population rise, Britain had lots of capital from colonies, in which the quality of goods went down but the quantity rose. Another negative cause and effect of the industrial revolution was that there was dynamo, variety went down there was more uniformity (in the products) and workers and consumers were abused.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  There were two different types of systems that Britain had. One was the Domestic system. In which, products were made in the home, quantity was lower but quality was higher, people worked at home and made the entire product from beginning to end, this was a good way to do it but took long hours and hard work. The other type of system was the industrialized system, in which the products were made in a factory, assembly lines were used, and workers only made a piece of the product, the quantity of product went up, but the quality went down. The working conditions of the workers were unbearable.

Customer Eccentricity

The core idea is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. Simply, lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources. A lean organization understands customer value and focuses its key processes to continuously increase it. The ultimate goal is to provide perfect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste.To accomplish this, lean thinking changes the focus of management from optimizing separate technologies, assets, and vertical departments to optimizing the flow of products and services through entire value streams that flow horizontally across technologies, assets, and departments to customers. Eliminating waste along entire value streams, instead of at isolated points, creates processes that need less human effort, less space, less capital, and less time to make products and services at far less costs and with much fewer defects, compared with traditional business systems.Companies are able to respond to changing cus tomer desires with high variety, high quality, low cost, and with very fast throughput times. Also, information management becomes much simpler and more accurate. A BRIEF HISTORY OF LEAN Although there are instances of rigorous process thinking in manufacturing all the way back to the Arsenal in Venice in the 1450s, the first person to truly integrate an entire production process was Henry Ford.At Highland Park, MI, in 1913 he married consistently interchangeable parts with standard work and moving conveyance to create what he called flow production. The public grasped this in the dramatic form of the moving assembly line, but from the standpoint of the manufacturing engineer the breakthroughs actually went much further. Ford lined up fabrication steps in process sequence wherever possible using special-purpose machines and go/no-go gauges to fabricate and assemble the components going into the vehicle within a few minutes, and deliver erfectly fitting components directly to line-si de. This was a truly revolutionary break from the shop practices of the American System that consisted of general-purpose machines grouped by process, which made parts that eventually found their way into finished products after a good bit of tinkering (fitting) in subassembly and final assembly. †¦ The problem with Ford’s system was not the flow: He was able to turn the inventories of the entire company every few days.Rather it was his inability to provide variety. The Model T was not just limited to one color. It was also limited to one specification so that all Model T chassis were essentially identical up through the end of production in 1926. (The customer did have a choice of four or five body styles, a drop-on feature from outside suppliers added at the very end of the production line. Indeed, it appears that practically every machine in the Ford Motor Company worked on a single part number, and there were essentially no changeovers. When the world wanted variety, including model cycles shorter than the 19 years for the Model T, Ford seemed to lose his way. Other automakers responded to the need for many models, each with many options, but with production systems whose design and fabrication steps regressed toward process areas with much longer throughput times.Over time they populated their fabrication shops with larger and larger machines that ran faster and faster, apparently lowering costs per process step, but continually increasing throughput times and inventories except in the rare case—like engine machining lines—where all of the process steps could be linked and automated. Even worse, the time lags between process steps and the complex part routings required ever more sophisticated information management systems culminating in computerized Materials Requirements Planning(MRP) systems .As Kiichiro Toyoda, Taiichi Ohno, and others at Toyota looked at this situation in the 1930s, and more intensely just after World War II , it occurred to them that a series of simple innovations might make it more possible to provide both continuity in process flow and a wide variety in product offerings. They therefore revisited Ford’s original thinking, and invented the Toyota Production System. This system in essence shifted the focus of the manufacturing engineer from individual machines and their utilization, to the flow of the product through the total process.Toyota concluded that by right-sizing machines for the actual volume needed, introducing self-monitoring machines to ensure quality, lining the machines up in process sequence, pioneering quick setups so each machine could make small volumes of many part numbers, and having each process step notify the previous step of its current needs for materials, it would be possible to obtain low cost, high variety, high quality, and very rapid throughput times to respond to changing customer desires. Also, information management could be made much simpler an d more accurate.PRINCIPLES OF LEAN The five-step thought process for guiding the implementation of lean techniques is easy to remember, but not always easy to achieve: 1. Specify value from the standpoint of the end customer by product family. 2. Identify all the steps in the value stream for each product family, eliminating whenever possible those steps that do not create value. 3. Make the value-creating steps occur in tight sequence so the product will flow smoothly toward the customer. 4. As flow is introduced, let customers pull value from the next upstream activity. . As value is specified, value streams are identified, wasted steps are removed, and flow and pull are introduced, begin the process again and continue it until a state of perfection is reached in which perfect value is created with no waste. LEAN ACTION PLAN While every individual or company embarking on a lean journey will have different challenges based on their particular set of circumstances, there are several crucial steps that can help reduce resistance, spread the right learning, and engender the type of commitment necessary for lean enterprise.Getting Started †¢Find a change agent, a leader who will take personal responsibility for the lean transformation. †¢Get the lean knowledge, via a sensei or consultant, who can teach lean techniques and how to implement them as part of a system, not as isolated programs. †¢Find a lever by seizing a crisis or by creating one to begin the transformation. If your company currently isn’t in crisis, focus attention on a lean competitor or find a lean customer or supplier who will make demands for dramatically better performance. Forget grand strategy for the moment. †¢Map the value streams, beginning with the current state of how material and information flow now, then drawing a leaner future state of how they should flow and creating an implementation plan with timetable. †¢Begin as soon as possible with an important and visible activity. †¢Demand immediate results. †¢As soon as you’ve got momentum, expand your scope to link improvements in the value streams and move beyond the shop floor to office processes.Creating an Organization to Channel Your Value Streams †¢Reorganize your firm by product family and value stream. †¢Create a lean promotion function. †¢Deal with excess people at the outset, and then promise that no one will lose their job in the future due to the introduction of lean techniques. †¢Devise a growth strategy. †¢Remove the anchor-draggers. †¢Once you’ve fixed something, fix it again. †¢Ã¢â‚¬Å"Two steps forward and one step backward is O. K. ; no steps forward is not O. K. Install Business Systems to Encourage Lean Thinking †¢Utilize policy deployment. †¢Create a lean accounting system. †¢Pay your people in relation to the performance of your firm. †¢Make performance measures transparent. †¢Teac h lean thinking and skills to everyone. †¢Right-size your tools, such as production equipment and information systems. Completing the Transformation †¢Convince your suppliers and customers to take the steps just described. †¢Develop a lean global strategy. Convert from top-down leadership to leadership based on questioning, coaching, and teaching and rooted in the scientific method of plan-do-check-act . Integrate Six Sigma, Lean and Kaizen People spend months drilling the Six Sigma process and statistical tools 1-Sample Sign Test This is used to test the probability of a sample median being equal to hypothesized value. H0: m1=m2=m3=m4 (null hypothesis) Ha: At least one is different (alternate hypothesis)

Alzheimers Disease Pathogenesis and Herpes Simplex Virus - Free Essay Example

Sample details Pages: 2 Words: 653 Downloads: 10 Date added: 2019/04/12 Category Medicine Essay Level High school Tags: Alzheimer's Disease Essay Did you like this example? Abstract Alzheimers disease is a disease of the central nervous system for which there is currently no cure. Over the years researchers have postulated many theories and hypotheses about the causative agents of the disease. The disease is suggested to be a result of a combination of multiple environmental, pathogenic(viral), lifestyle and genetic factors. Don’t waste time! Our writers will create an original "Alzheimers Disease Pathogenesis and Herpes Simplex Virus" essay for you Create order It is hallmarked by the presence of plaques and tangles in the brain which lead neuronal degeneration symptomized by decline in cognitive abilities, behavioral impedance, inability to perform simple daily tasks, and in some cases impairment of sight and smell. Particularly, Herpes Simplex Virus 1 has been one of the most widely studied viral factors in connection to Alzheimers disease pathogenesis. For the purpose of this paper, I propose that Herpes Simplex Virus 1 is a major contributor to the series of neuronal processes that lead to the generation of plaques and tangles in the brain, and thus it may provide a new approach towards finding a cure for Alzheimers disease. Introduction Alzheimers disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease which presents more prevalently in older adults and has a wide variety of probable causative agents, age being one of the most common. In 2000, there were 4.5 million persons with AD in the US population. By 2050, this number will increase by almost 3-fold, to 13.2 million (Herbert et al., 2003). This proposed increase in the number of people with Alzheimers by the year 2050 is a result of the rapid increase in the number of the aging population in the United states. Alzheimers disease, like any other disease, is detrimental to the health and lifestyle of affected individuals. Thedisease is characterized by progressive decline in cognitive abilities, behavioral abnormalities, and the loss of ability to function at work or in activities of daily living (Harris and Harris, 2018). Researchs over the years have continued to link a wide number of factors as contributing agents towards the occurrence and progression of AD. From genetic s to lifestyle, the number of factors that contribute to the development of Alzheimers later or early in life is exhaustive. A higher percentage of diagnosis of Alzheimers occur at a later stage of life but as with all things, there exists an exception to this norm. A small percentage of the Alzheimers presenting population are diagnosed at an earlier age than usual. Early-onset Alzheimers disease (EOAD), as it is termed,accounts for 16% of all cases and ranges approximately with onset from 30â€Å"60 or 65 years (Alonso Vilatela et al., 2012). About 60% of these patients are classified as familial EOAD, having multiple relatives diagnosed with the disease (Harris and Harris, 2018). The familial nature of EOAD is linked to a genetic mutation in families with this form of AD. According to Betram and Tanzi (2008),all mutations that are currently known to cause AD in early ­-onset autosomal dominant families are located either in the amyloid precursor protein (APP)gene itself or in the genes that encode the proteins that lie at the catalytic center of the-secretase complex: presenilin 1 (PSEN1) and presenilin 2 (PSEN2). By contrast, suscep ­tibility for late ­-onset AD (60 or 65 years) shows less? obvious or no appar ­ent familial aggregation (hence it is sometimes called sporadic AD) and is likely to be governed by an array of common risk alleles across a number of different genes (Betram and Tanzi, 2008). Both forms of Alzheimers appear to be linked to a genetic factor, with the EOAD being more specific to a particular gene locus and the LOAD linked to a number of genes. Nonetheless, both forms of AD are influenced by factors other than genetics which eventually leads to the manifestation of the disease early or later on. Some of these other factors that lead to onset of Alzheimers are cerebrovascular accidents mostly due to falls, stress, immunosuppression, strokes, viral infections etc. For the purpose of this paper, the possible correlation between viral infections of the brain, specifically Herpes Simplex Virus 1, and the pathogenesis of AD will be analyzed.