The HR strategy of many multinational companies to take part time temporary employees or leasing temporary employees from learing companies.
HR Strategies
The HR strategy of many multinational companies to
take part time temporary employees or leasing temporary employees from learing
companies. Employees specially working in IT firms in India are working on one
to five year projects and re experiencing ‘Pink – slip syndrome’ as to what to
do after the project is completed. The worst hit are those employees who are
sacked from their jobs after September, 11 2002 attack of world trade centre.
The number of employees who work only part – time
is steadily increasing. Part-timers are attractive to a company because the
firm does not need to pay fringe benefits, such as health insurance and pension
plans.
Telecommuting, office at
home, flexi time and career breaks are the order of the day firms also resort
for employing from diverse cultures. Pharma companies like Hoechst and cosmetic
firms like Avon could turnaround unprofitable inner city markets by taking
local persons to manage local markets
Information systems strategy
Corporations are increasingly adopting information
system strategies in that they are turning to information systems technology to
provide business units with competitive advantage.
In 1989, Wal-Mart started building a huge database
of customer information in its data warehouse systems located at its
headquarters at Bentonville, Arkansas. The company collected sales and customer
related information for each store and fed that information into the warehouse
systems.
In the early 1990s, Wal-Mart continued to employ
new technologies to facilitate better analysis of customer data as they became
available. Wal-mart’s IT experts used 3-D visualization tools to make accurate
estimates of products most likely to be bought by customers on the basis of
parameters such as ethnicity, geographic location, weather patterns, local
sports affiliations, and around 10,000 other varied parameters. Wal-Mart made
around 90% of its stock replenishments every month, based on the analysis of
customer data generated through the data warehouse.
To make shopping at Wal-Mart a pleasant experience,
Wal-Mart installed customer information kiosks in its stores in 1996. The
kiosks helped customers find out the price of any product and get a brief
description of it. In 1996, Wal-Mart launched its website – www.walmart. com -
to provide information to its customers on all the products it stocked and to
enable online sales.
IT played an important role in improving the
efficiency of operations at Wal-Mart. The benefits which accrued were passed on
to customers, as per Wal-Mart’s policy. Wal-Mart’s annual report 1999 said, “The
first and the most important thing about Wal-Mart’s information systems is
precisely that the customer’s needs come first. By using technology to reduce
inventory, expenses and shrinkage, we can create lower prices for our customers
and better returns for our shareholders”.
At the dawn of the new millennium, Wal-Mart was one
of the world’s largest companies, with revenues of $165 bn in fiscal 2000.
Wal-Mart’s ‘store of the community’ program made effective use of bar code
technology and advanced data mining techniques. The ‘store of the community’
program was a very successful initiative by Wal-Mart, which contributed to
increased customer loyalty. By 2003, Wal-Mart was the world’s largest company,
with revenues in fiscal 2002 amounting to $244.5 bn. Multinational corporations
are finding that the use of a sophisticated intranet for the use of its
employees allows them to practice follow – the –sun management, in which
project team members living in 1 country can pass their work to team members in
another country in which the work day is just beginning. Thus, night shifts are
no longer needed. The development of instant translation software is also
enabling workers to have online communication with coworkers in other countries
who use a different language. Lotus Translation Services for Same time is a
Java –based application that can deliver translated text during a chart session or an instant in 17 languages. Software, e-lingo (www.e-lingo.com)
offers a multilingual search function and Web surfing as well as text and
e-mail translation. Tags : Strategic Management - Functional Strategy
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