Corus: Continuous Improvement as a Business Strategy
Discuss about the Innovation and Continuous Improvement for Business Strategy.
This report provides a detailed analysis of how an organization can apply continuous improvement strategies for keeping the operation in place. This report involves the analysis of three different marketing aspects such as Continuous Improvement Strategy of Corus, ethics and sustainability and incorporation of innovation of a new product. Continuous Improvement (CI) is applied by many large organizations to speed up their operation and reduce the waste in operation. Thus, the report show Corus can gain benefits from Continuous Improvement strategy. Likewise, the report also show the impact of ethics and sustainability in business.
Continuous improvement is derived from the Japanese word “Kaizen” which is particularly a technique for identifying opportunities for streamlining the overall work and minimising the amount of waste in the operation. This practice was first formed by the popularity of lean/agile/Kaizen in manufacturing and business but it is now being used by the thousands of business across the world. Furthermore, continuous improvement can be considered as both formal and informal range of guidelines. Consequently, several business now have paid attention to this process management- such as Kaizen. Under this Kaizen method, continuous improvement remains as the primary focus.
Usually, the human resource department of the organization take the responsibility of applying continuous improvement in business because CI could involve the supervisions of manpower, machinery, finance and all these aspects of business are usually supervised by thee human resource department of the organizations. In the case of Corus, it is widely known that HR department of the firm is highly effective because the organizations deals with broad categories of business operation requiring financial investment, manpower, and planning. Thus, the personnel involved in the HR department of the business can apply CI to existing operation. For example, HR personnel at Corus needs to make a broad commitment to avoid the “us and them” mentality. This means that HR needs to ensure that each of employee of the business is moving towards the same goals; so, an integrated commitment is required for CI implementation.
The case study indicates that CI is a process to streamline the work in a more efficient way and reducing waste in the operation and to do this effectively, the organization as a whole should remain united with the similar goals and objectives. So, Corus is a large brand with extending marketing penetration and its current objective and operational scenario implies that Corus is seeking to develop a market culture. Corus is trying to insist on finishing work as well as getting things done. Organizational members of Corus are competitive and focused on goals and the leaders are tough with high expectation. Making dynamic work process effective and reducing cost is challenging. Thus, unless the leaders have high expectation and broad goals, the implementation of CI may appear to be challenging. The vision of Corus is to become a global steel industry benchmark which is aligned with its Continuous Improvement (CI) strategy because the purpose of CI is to develop a more flawless operation and reduce waste. So, when an organization is able to incorporate such continuous improvement, it is certain that the business could create industry benchmark for corporate citizenship.
Type of culture Corus and vision planning helping to develop the culture
The Key Performance Indicators (KPI) of Corus is developed on the basis of the major aspects of their business such as safety, working capital and turnover, net debt, performance and environment. This means the business has developed a certain standards in all these areas, which would help to measure the growth. CI must include a growth measurement scale to understand the progress of the process. For example, if the safety environmental sustainability initiatives are taken properly, it is certain that corporate image could be affected and when the corporate image is not strengthened, the business could face external challenge. On the other side, during this continuous improvement process, if the employees do not receive adequate guidance and support to take the performance initiatives, the overall performance of the fir might fall down which could in return affect he performance of the employees . Thus, it is effective for Corus to include performance and environmental sustainability in its KPIs.
There are several benefits of Continuous Improvement (CI) but some of the major benefits that helping Corus to become innovative towards their customer and organizations; for example, by applying CI, the business could create streamline workflow such as working constantly to enhance work process and minimize the operating overhead. CI is similar to lean process because the lean way of working could improve the efficiency of the employees that help to save time and cost and eventually reducing the overall waste in the operation. Similarly, the principles of lean management model states the similar fact that customer value and operational value are specified and then the waste are removed.
It is highly effective for the management to know the cost of performing a body of work and for this particular factor, most of the business could benefit from knowing the amount of time to get the work done. Thus, understanding this principle, Corus should focus on reducing cost as well as prevent overage.
Ethical business practice is referred to the action of studying a proper business policies as well as practices about potentially controversial issues such as corporate governance, insider trading, discrimination, corporate sustainability and other practices. So, it is worth mentioning that ethical practice of business must have to ensure a certain level of trust remains between the consumers as well as different level of market participants. For example, it is identified that Tata Steel believes in incorporating the best practise with respect to corporate governance that continue to improve. The organizations performs all aspects of its business with maximum transparency as well as accountability.
Analysing how achieving its KPI would help Corus to give its customer satisfaction
It has been identified that the concept of sustainable business practice has received an increasing recognition; however, it is an innovative idea for many business today, as for most of the businesses, the sustainability concept remain abstract. If a business wants to create a competitive edge, the sustainability is referred to achieve its potential and it has to be integrated into the planning as well as measurement of organization’s operation. The pressure from the external environment such as customers, shareholders, governments and general citizens could actually push the firms to enhance their environmental performance. However, most of the business do not care about the competitors and their strategies.
Therefore, by paying attention to sustainability practices and competitors strategies, Corus can be sure about the environmental actions taken by the competitors. In addition to this, it has also been identified that effective sustainability practice can enhance the brand image as well as competitive benefits. A study reveals that almost 58% of total 53,000 U.S customers consider brand’s impact on the environment during making the purchase of goods. This means, they are more likely to buy products from the brand that tend to develop sustainable habits. Another significant fact helping brands to compete can be mentioned for example, is that Tata Steel India took the initiative of developing the rural education in the interior place of India, which inspires many large brands in the global market. This initiative increased the brand image of Tata Steel which is reflected on its sales report. In addition to this, effective sustainability practice also leads the brand steps ahead from the competitors in terms of business ability and compliance. It is identified that governments of the nations are passing the law to protect the environment; thereby, incorporation of such sustainability approaches into business could enable the brand to deal with the changing regulations in a smooth manner.
It has been identified that Carbon Footprint could allow keeping a track of direct and indirect greenhouse gas emission of organizations. The major difference between these two significant approaches remains in way that Carbon Footprint Calculation can only be considered as greenhouse gas emission, but LCA only takes the impact of other categories like Eco toxicity, human toxicity, acidification and use of land. Five more than fifty categories can be used under LCA and only is available for the Carbon Footprint. Carbon Footprint calculation remains interesting as it is quick and enable easy result interpretation . Nonetheless, LCA could avoid the hasty conclusions when reducing the environmental impact of a product by not focussing on the impact which could transfer to other categories. For instance, it can be mentioned that if an action is taken to minimize the amount of carbon footprint of a product by 20% may simultaneously enhance its impact by 60%.
Key benefits of CI in helping Corus to become more innovative and customer focussed organization
Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) is an accurate method to determine the range of carbon dioxide emission connected to company’s products and service. LCA method is highly effective because it helps to measure the carbon emission rate during the full life cycle of product. LCA considers the total volume of CO2 emission at the time of mining and extraction transportation of raw materials and processing the waste management. Furthermore, LCA analysis has the ability to measure some particular production phases. As the organization Tata Steel is determined to review and assess and consumption of raw material for products and services. It might help the business to take advantage of environmental Awareness as the business can observe a competitive advantage
As world’s leading steel producers Tata Steel is highly dedicated to managing its operation and to continuous improvement (CI). The business is committed to work in partnership with the local communities to sustain its social and economic wellbeing. The organization has developed “Community Partnership Program”, which provides investment in a range of sustainable initiatives that return benefits to the broad groups with the communities. The theme of the community partnership is “Future Generation” and the theme revolves around the initiatives of developing education, environment, health and wellbeing .
The organizations provide donations to charitable and non-profit organizations within the communities or the market where the organizations currently operate the functions. Particularly, the organization Tata Steel has partnership with Telstar club to provide educational health and wellbeing activities for the youngsters. When it comes to ethical business practices, it is worth mentioning that ethical behaviour is intrinsic to its business and it has become a significant part of its legacy since its foundation because the ethical practices of Tata Steel is aligned with its core values, business principles, communities and environments. Core principles of Tata Steel indicates that the business is committed to conform to the maximum moral and ethical standards and its business does not tolerate bribery or corruption at all. The business is committed to good corporate to corporate citizens. The business makes the balance the interest of its stakeholders treating each of them fairly to avoid unfair and unethical discrimination of any sort.
Team goals and objectives: The major goal of the team is to derive and apply understanding about the innovation. Considering this goal, the objective is to innovate an existing product to generate more suitable outcome from it.
Tata Steel: Ethics and Sustainability
Task and responsibilities: The task is to develop or modify an existing product as an innovation as this would help team members to gain understanding about how innovation is applied to real-world context.
Product: In order to apply innovation to the real world context, the existing product microprocessor is supposed to be innovated with the name of “Nano Chip”. Microprocessor is known as most fundamental part of modern personal computer but it is mostly known as the advanced computer device. It integrates the major functions of central processing unit (CPU). Microprocessor is mainly responsible for performing the programmed instructions into a single microprocessor design.
It has been identified that before the inventions of microprocessor, there were some large sort of early technologies particularly for stimulating the functions in computing the entire devices. These early technologies were highly expensive, slow and they are more prone to failure. However, in the present days, the capabilities of microprocessor are excellent. For example, the invention of IBM was a big contribution to the development of microprocessor as the four bit chip provided much more pioneering work which is associated with the first generation microprocessor technology. In addition to this, it is also identified that in the mid-1970 the National Semiconductor entered the field of microprocessor which is further enticed by the rapid pace of breakthrough of Intel. Microprocessor today are intensively powerful and they are capable of executing more complicated instructions at a more faster rate than the stages of development took place in the early age of microprocessor. The core engine of microprocessor developed today could certainly be the creation of new type of new semiconductor that allow more transistors to be placed on the microchips.
The microprocessors developed today need to be modified or innovated because today’s microprocessors have the limitation on the size of data and most of the microprocessor does not support the floating point operation. On the other side, a research provided the findings that major flaw in today’s microprocessor is that it is overheating (). The microprocessor should not contact with any other external devices. In addition to this, a 4 microprocessor could accept, translate and communicate a 4-bit or four different integer, instruction and also known as a 4 bit word. It is also observed that an 8 microprocessor could process an 8 bit instruction. In addition, 16 bit microprocessor could utilize a 16 bit word, 32 bit processor uses 32 but word and so forth. A device that uses a microprocessor is normally capable of several functions like word processing, calculation and communicating through internet and telephone ().
Ethical Business Practices
Moreover, the microprocessor used today does not have any internal peripheral like ROM and RAM and other input/output device. Thus, it is highly necessary to innovate this existing microprocessor which could decrease the mentioned flaws. The major development area of existing microprocessor is, shifting of data. This means that the products will be developed in a way that it can swiftly move data between various memory locations.
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