Corporate

Developing The Best Brand Strategy For Your Business

Developing a successful brand strategy is essential to the success of your business. The name of your company, the product that you sell, and the overall impression, style, and perceived direction and mission of a business or company.

This article will describe some instances in which a branding strategy or rebranding strategy can be beneficial, and some of the steps involved in the creation of one.

A brand can be solidified and recognized by logos, customer service, and by the family brand under which it is marketed. This is also called family brand, and companies like Disney and Coca Cola incorporate this strategy into their marketing plan.

Disney yogurt, for example, may feature pictures of Mickey Mouse and the Magic Kingdom logo on the box. This connects the product to the Disney Corporation as a whole in the mind of the consumer. When the same consumer purchases a Disney movie, Disney licensed clothing, shoes, or sunglasses, they are showing a brand preference, which is the goal of any effective marketing strategy.

Newer companies work hard to establish their brands, employing marketing teams in house or employing outside marketing and branding experts, with the goal of making sure that any time that a consumer comes in contact with anything associated with a specific company, the brand for that company is reinforced in the minds of the consumers who do so.

Older companies may decide to undergo a rebranding process as their business expands, comes under new ownership, or attempts to appeal to a different demographic.

Many large companies, including McDonalds, have done this successfully. Initially, the restaurant was a take out eatery, but as more and more people, namely families, began to frequent it, the company realized that it could make more money and attract a larger demographic by redesigning and remodeling their restaurants in order to accommodate booths and tables.

Other companies, mainly tobacco companies have gone through more dramatic rebranding, in order to keep abreast with trends, new research, and the general public opinion and consensus of their products.

A brand is a company first chance to make a good impression on the minds of consumers, investors, employees, and anyone associated with, or potentially associated with, a product or service.

Development of a logo, of a set of standards, of a mission, and even of a color scheme for franchises all contribute to this overall feel of a company, product, or service.

For more information about business naming and corporate branding visit our site.

Top Tips for Making Your Office Greener

Despite making changes to their home lives, workers are unlikely to be quite so environmentally -minded at work, particularly if their employers are not seen to take the issue seriously. For this reason change must happen top-down, unless you have an eco-warrior employee who is prepared to plan and implement carbon-saving changes. Here are a few simple things you can do to make your office greener, and I’m not talking USB kettles or reusing teabags.

Travel

Use public transport where possible, and consider implementing a car sharing initiative, it will help you become greener and maybe even bring the workforce closer together. Many firms are also introducing a ride-to-work scheme whereby the company helps out with the cost of a bicycle for the employee to cycle to work. It improves the environment and the mental and physical health of your employees.

Lights

Turning lights off when they’re not in use and replacing old bulbs with energy saving ones greatly increases your green credentials. Utilise natural light wherever possible. It may sound obvious but there is a tendency to put the lights on instead of opening the blinds.

Technology

Replace old energy inefficient hardware with new economic items. You’ll save the world and some money!

Don’t use the air conditioner when opening a window will do. Conditioned air is not nearly as good for you and your employees as a nice bit of (free) fresh air.

Nothing Disposable

Replace paper and plastic cups and cutlery with real ones. Not only are mugs and glasses much better for the environment, but they’re also much nicer to drink from!

Don’t use the dishwasher unless you have a full load, it is easier just to rinse.

Turn Your Computer Off

Turn your computer off when you leave the office, not just the monitor. And that goes for the air conditioner as well.

Really, what is the point turning the lights off and recycling your waste if you’re going to leave your computer on?

Recycle

The emphasis should be on employers to make recycling at work easy and convenient for employees. Getting employees to separate their waste will force them to think about how much paper they waste.

Communication

Use electronic methods of communication rather than leaving notes or memos around the office. Consider using an online forum, messageboard or messenger applications for staff chit-chat instead of passing notes around, you naughty boys and girls! Shall I read it to the whole class?

Only print emails if it is absolutely essential, and add a ‘Think before you print’ disclaimer to your email signature. If you do need to print to paper, set up your printer to double-sided, every little counts!

John Mce writes on behalf of Arc Vision, a company which specialise in corporate responsibility consultancy and recruitment.

The Basic Definition of Concurrent Engineering

Concurrent Engineering is theoretically defined as a systematic approach to the concurrent design of products and their related processes, including manufacture and support. It is an example of group decision making and negotiation that commonly occurs in organizations and involves many agents.

Concurrent Engineering is an evolving process that requires continuous improvement and refinement. It is well established as an approach to engineer product parts, however, the concept has a much broader application. Concurrent engineering is the simultaneous consideration of product and process downstream requirements by multidisciplinary teams.

Specialists from all disciplines, including reliability, maintainability, human factors, safety, logistics, business and management, whose expertise will eventually be represented in the product, have important contributions throughout the system life cycle.

Simply put, it is a business strategy which replaces the traditional product development process with one in which tasks are done in parallel and there is an early consideration for every aspect of a products development process.

This strategy focuses on the optimization and distribution of a firms assets in the design and development process to ensure effective, efficient and concurrent product development process to minimize duplicate or repeat effort and risk.

Concurrent Engineering is now widely accepted as an appropriate method for producing better products faster and for lower cost. Information sharing, conflict resolution and version management are three very important aspects of this process.

Using this business strategy, manufacturers will learn how they can electronically define their critical part attributes both purchased and manufactured, deliver inspection sampling plans to their vendors over the internet and manage the quality trends of each supplier. Paperless process planning allows entire work instructions with data collections to be imbedded directly onto drawings or solid models.

Manufacturers need information about inventory availability, machine uptime and down time, product cycle times, yield, waste, WIP and lot tracking and genealogy. They need information management tools in real time for continuous improvement and decision support, and Concurrent Engineering can help them achieve this.

Many leading manufacturers have made great strides in optimizing materials usage by implementing powerful supply chain applications, and thus streamlining their manufacturing and planning processes. This is largely because this strategy requires applications across all functions within the company to share and communicate information. Each application used in the product development process needs to be linked to the rest.

Thus, this strategy has enabled many organizations to improve their product development, production, and product support and customer relationships. The evidence suggests that when a Concurrent Engineering approach is appropriately designed and implemented, organizational performance improves significantly, resulting in lower cost, improved product quality, reduction in cycle time and time to market, and improved utilization and coordination of human resources.

iBASEt is a leading provider of high-tech software solutions and services. Learn more about Solumina, its Manufacturing Execution Systems online.

Conducting an Effective Internal Privacy Audit

Before an organization can truly dedicate itself to the principles of privacy protection, it needs to take stock of its personal information holdings and the procedures it currently has in place. And in order to move forward on this road to privacy compliance, an organization needs to ask three basic questions: What type of personal information do we hold, where is it stored and how is it managed?

Enter the privacy audit. An audit allows an organization to take inventory of its personal information databank, identify the information needs of the different functions within the organization and understand current information practices, including how and why personal information is collected, used and disclosed. In establishing and conducting a privacy audit, an organization should make sure to keep one basic truism in mind: employees generally do what you inspect, not what you expect!

An internal privacy audit provides a critical self-assessment. It is essential to stress to staff members who have been asked to participate in the audit that they should have no fear of “failing a test” or being called to task for any of their current practices. On the contrary, what an organization needs to focus on at this stage is developing a comprehensive and accurate inventory, one that requires no judgments and no right or wrong answers. The primary objective of the audit must be reinforced: To collect information on current practices that can inform the planning and decision-making process regarding the future application of privacy best practices within the organization.

Once current on-line and off-line practices across the organization are understood, a comprehensive risk assessment can be undertaken. Business practices can be evaluated to identify the gaps in compliance with best practice benchmarks. Based on the level of risk, action steps and timelines for compliance initiatives can be prioritized.

To be most effective, privacy audits must be conducted by someone familiar with privacy issues but not heavily involved in managing day to day operations, such as the privacy office or an internal audit group.

Taking Inventory

The audit begins by taking an inventory of the personal information records currently in existence and of the organization’s information management policies and practices. In some situations, the organization may collect personal information from a wide range of sources, such as customers, partners, contractors, employees, vendors, and even the public at large. Each department in the organization needs to be scrutinized by way of this inventory process in order to determine how and why personal information is collected and used; whether consents were obtained and what form they took; how that information is safeguarded; how long it is retained; and to whom it is released and why.

For an effective inventory, all documentation used to collect and disclose personal information in the course of day-to-day business operations must be reviewed. This important step consists of examining all forms, contracts, confidentiality agreements, third-party assignments, privacy codes of practice, written procedures, fax and e-mail templates etc. By assessing each carefully, one can determine whether the documents are complete and comprehensive in terms of privacy protection or whether they need to be re-drafted or revamped.

It is important when conducting the audit to examine personal information records held in hardcopy, in system folders and other electronic media, as well as any online collections or disclosures. Organizations need to think through all the methods through which personal information is collected. Some examples include:

- Order forms or application forms
- Contests
- E-mails
- Surveys
- Warranties
- Delivery services
- Websites
- Call centre activity and recordings
- Loyalty or referral programs

On of the critical question that needs to be answered during the audit is: What are the information needs of the different departments within the organization? Staff interviews, employee surveys and group discussions can help answer this question. By talking to employees, one can get a really good sense not only of the formal practices, but the informal, accepted norms adopted by the department.

Potential Audit Questions:

- How does your organization (or unit or department) collect personal information?
- Why does your organization collect personal information?
- Are individuals made aware that the organization is collecting their personal information?
- If so, are individuals informed of the purpose(s) for collecting their personal information?
- Is consent obtained from individuals before collecting or using their personal information? If so, what methods are used to obtain that consent?
- How does the organization use personal information?
- To whom does the organization disclose the personal information?
- Are individuals informed of the intended uses and disclosures of their personal information? If so, what methods are used to inform them?
- Is the personal information held by the organization accurate, complete and up-to-date?
- How does the organization store personal information? Where is it stored?
- Who has access to personal information held by the organization and who truly needs to have that access?
- Does the organization have measures in place to protect the personal information it holds from unauthorized access, collection use, disclosure or modifications?
- How long does the organization retain personal information?
- How does the organization destroy or dispose of personal information?

With the audit steps complete, a report is then created, summarizing the results and providing recommendations for the organization to follow based on the areas that need greater focus. Effectively, the report helps the organization devise a thorough and comprehensive privacy plan of attack, one that responds effectively to the organization’s particular needs, and that helps it move forward in the direction of achieving a strong privacy management program.

Fazila Nurani is a privacy consultant, lawyer and lead trainer with PrivaTech Consulting. Fazila has conducted privacy audits in a wide range of industries. She advises organizations on privacy best practices, and reducing the risk of a privacy or information security breach. She may be reached at +1.905.886.0751 or fnurani@privatech.ca.

What Is Concurrent Engineering

Concurrent Engineering is theoretically defined as a systematic approach to the concurrent design of products and their related processes, including manufacture and support. It is an example of group decision making and negotiation that commonly occurs in organizations and involves many agents.

Concurrent Engineering is an evolving process that requires continuous improvement and refinement. It is well established as an approach to engineer product parts, however, the concept has a much broader application. Concurrent engineering is the simultaneous consideration of product and process downstream requirements by multidisciplinary teams.

Specialists from all disciplines, including reliability, maintainability, human factors, safety, logistics, business and management, whose expertise will eventually be represented in the product, have important contributions throughout the system life cycle.

Simply put, it is a business strategy which replaces the traditional product development process with one in which tasks are done in parallel and there is an early consideration for every aspect of a products development process.

This strategy focuses on the optimization and distribution of a firms assets in the design and development process to ensure effective, efficient and concurrent product development process to minimize duplicate or repeat effort and risk.

Concurrent Engineering is now widely accepted as an appropriate method for producing better products faster and for lower cost. Information sharing, conflict resolution and version management are three very important aspects of this process.

Using this business strategy, manufacturers will learn how they can electronically define their critical part attributes both purchased and manufactured, deliver inspection sampling plans to their vendors over the internet and manage the quality trends of each supplier. Paperless process planning allows entire work instructions with data collections to be imbedded directly onto drawings or solid models.

Manufacturers need information about inventory availability, machine uptime and down time, product cycle times, yield, waste, WIP and lot tracking and genealogy. They need information management tools in real time for continuous improvement and decision support, and Concurrent Engineering can help them achieve this.

Many leading manufacturers have made great strides in optimizing materials usage by implementing powerful supply chain applications, and thus streamlining their manufacturing and planning processes. This is largely because this strategy requires applications across all functions within the company to share and communicate information. Each application used in the product development process needs to be linked to the rest.

Thus, this strategy has enabled many organizations to improve their product development, production, and product support and customer relationships. The evidence suggests that when a Concurrent Engineering approach is appropriately designed and implemented, organizational performance improves significantly, resulting in lower cost, improved product quality, reduction in cycle time and time to market, and improved utilization and coordination of human resources.

iBASEt is a leading provider of high-tech software solutions and services. Learn more about Solumina, its Concurrent Engineering software online.