Reengineering Business Process

The topic of leadership is a lengthy subject, ranging from academic research to published works and articles. The discussion of leadership can be found in Greek and Roman texts, as well as works in the new millennia. In the project management field, however, leadership has been a sleeping giant, which is just emerging as a topic of research and publication.

Project management material in the 20th century consisted of work investigating the mechanics of the process of managing a temporary endeavor. The items of concern were: (1) cost, (2) schedule, and (3) resources. Later work recognized the need to incorporate deliverables, or scope into the project equation. The author finds these items to be the “hard” aspects of managing a project, subject to analysis, with a spreadsheet or other computer software package.

Effective administration of these project factors is not enough to guarantee success. Project managers need to be skilled in “soft” areas, such as change management, emotional intelligence, and leadership. The leader needs to have experience as a project manager, and to recognize how the needs of the project change over the life of the effort.

Leader behaviors will consist of a task or relationship focus. Task focused leaders will keep an eye on the mechanics of the project, and seek to drive their team toward achieving a project that has positive schedule, budget and deliverable outcomes. Relationship leaders seek to achieve team harmony through consensus building, and to communicate with their external stakeholders, such as the project sponsor and executive committee.

The successful leader recognizes how their style-orientation will change over the life of the project. During the early phases of the work, the leader will score high on relationship factors, as the need to sell, tell and motivate others is paramount. In the middle part of the project, the leader will concentrate on task factors, such as monitoring cost, schedule, resource and deliverables. At the final third of the project, the leadership style will oscillate between both that task and relationship leader behaviors, as the need to monitor the project continues in its importance and the added need of obtaining additional assistance during project completion and closeout occurs.

Green Supply Chain Management has been rising in consciousness with the environment within the last couple of decades. Governments have released campaigns to market this issue to individuals. A number of organizations responded to this by applying green principles to their organization, for instance using environmental friendly raw material, decreasing the usage of petroleum power, and recycling papers for packaging. The green principles have been broadened to numerous departments within organizations, such as the supply chain. Green Supply Chain Management (GSCM) has been emerging within the last few years. This concept covers every single stage in manufacturing from the first to the final stage of the product life cycle.

A definition of Green Supply Chain Management is integrating environmental reasoning directly into logistics or supply chain management, which includes merchandise design, material sourcing as well as selection, production techniques, delivery of the final merchandise to the consumers, and end-of-life management with the merchandise after its beneficial life. GSCM helps reduced environmental load for the atmosphere, lower price prices for the supplier, reduce price for the producer, reduce expense of ownership for consumer, and a smaller amount consumption of resources for modern society.

Factors of why businesses should adopt the green thinking: target marketing, sustainability of resources, reduced costs/increased performance, merchandise differentiation and competitive advantage, aggressive and deliver chain pressures, adapting to regulation and reducing risk, brand reputation, return on investment, employee morale, and the ethical imperative.

In today’s business world, the competitive among business is quite high. To make a consumer impression, the firm needs to generate themselves standing out from others. Being environmental friendly is one method to differentiate them from the rivals. Furthermore, when rivals already adopted GSCM, the organization gets pressure instead. Therefore, it’s a excellent thought to implement GSCM no matter if the competitors have adopted it or not. Not only competition, but buyers affect for the company’s choice to adopt the GSCM. In numerous cases, buyers were the one who need specific treatment or unique products.

Not merely manufacturers have taken part; other supply chain organizations got engaged in GSCM too. The largest retailer in the U.S., Wal-Mart has an interesting story of adopting GSCM to their organization. In October 2005, Wal-Mart CEO committed the company to 3 goals: to be provided 100% by renewable power; to generate zero waste; and to sell solutions that sustain Wal-Mart’s means plus the atmosphere, and Wal-Mart was launching a company sustainability strategy to dramatically minimize the company’s impact on the global environment and turn out to be “the most competitive and innovative organization inside the planet.

Home Depot switched from suppliers shipping on pallets to slip sheets and have been able to avoided disposal expenses of 0,000, reduction in pallet purchases: 0,000 and decrease freight shipping expenses of .4 million. Environment savings was about 36,000 tons of waste wood prevented. The expense of leasing the push-pull attachments is expected to be at .0 million per year.

HP is the number one “Green Ranked” according to Newsweek. They’ve lowered energy usage by twenty percent from 2005 quantities. They have 1 billion recycle points and also include mailers for recycling printer cartridges. They’re making use of air bags for packaging to reduce the amount of cardboard employed and they estimate saving 300,000 trees. The printer’s ink cartridges are being used again for fencing stakes and roofing tiles.

Other distribution center changes for going green are decreasing packaging to much more recycling programs, to replacing warehouse metal halides lighting with T-5 or T-8 fixtures, to making use of waterless urinals in distribution centers.

John Sills is a Supply Chain Consultant for Supply Chain Consulting USA. He has been consulting for the last 5 years. He has worked for companies such as GE, Ryder, United Parcel Service, DHL and KEOGH Consulting. John has over 15 years of success optimizing supply chains for a wide range of products and industries. His specialties include supply chain and logistics strategy, process re-engineering, facility layout and design, project management, implementation, parts logistics and operations management.