Enhance Your Business with Business Management Software
All else being equal, consumers generally believe that a well-known brand name product is better than less well-known product, and this confers upon the organization distributing that brand of consumer goods enhanced pricing power. As such, a company’s brands can be among the most valuable assets an organization owns. Brand equity is something that can take 100 years or more to build up, and all it takes is one unfortunate incident to tear it completely down. Use business management software.
In September of 1982, seven people living in the Chicago area died suddenly after ingesting a brand name pain-relief medicine that had been criminally adulterated with potassium cyanide while still on the store shelves. Widespread panic arose resulting from the incident, and it grew to become the single greatest threat to the brand image of the major pharmaceutical manufacturer of that medicine. The episode cost the company to lose more than a billion dollars in market value, and it led to wide-ranging reforms to the way our consumer products are packaged in factories to this very day.
What to Do When Everything Goes Wrong
Rather than do nothing, the company ordered an immediate recall of all its related products everywhere. For this, the company was praised for its prompt action and managed to avoid the kind of disaster that would spell the demise of lesser organizations. Instead of going out of business, the company was hailed as a champion of consumer rights, and over time managed to preserve its valuable corporate brand image.
As corporate scandals and the attending failures of responsibility dominate the headlines, directors and managers of large organizations increasingly find themselves subject to more regulatory scrutiny. As news stories of serious breakdowns in corporate conduct continue to mount, it becomes clear to us that the world is in need of better compliance management tools. A compliance issue is negative event that need not happen. Preventing it from happening can save your organizations billions in lost market value.
Today’s compliance management tools are part of a suite of business management software products that can help organizations perform better by enforcing the policies and procedures that guide them toward their goal of being a good corporate citizen. These tools include software to facilitate risk management, enforce good corporate governance, standardize personnel training, document incidents, and conduct internal audits of operating procedures that enforce industry best practices.
Business Management Software to the Rescue
Business management software tools developed to assist managers with processing and analyzing information across entire multi-location organizations are part of a family of software tools known as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) products. Today’s modern ERP software solutions are commonly provided as web based cloud-computing applications leased from vendors that agree host the product on their own servers and provide the software “as a service” rather than as a product.
The most widely used business management software solutions belong to the family of enterprise tools that concern themselves with the concept of supply chain management or “SCM”. SCM helps organizations manage their supplier relationships with a goal of extracting maximum value out its entire supply chain. SCM tools empower managers by giving them the tools to rank and rate their suppliers and perform “discovery” in connection with which supplier is delivering the most real value in various and sometimes-intangible ways that are otherwise difficult to measure. The best and most valuable supply chain management tools give managers a window into the actual operations of its suppliers, and in some cases even into the operations of downstream suppliers to their own suppliers. In this way, the organization can see what is going on internally, and advise its supply chain on how it can operate more efficiently so it can offer price discounts while maintaining overall profitability.