Category Advisory

Introduction

COVID -19 as we now know, have created a lot of challenges and issues especially for businesses in general.

Before the spread of COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, majority of the businesses only thought about efficiency in their operation, hardly any management leaders consider resilience of their operations.

After almost two years of facing COVID-19 pandemic and counting the cost affected as results of the pandemic. A lot suddenly realize whatever they used to rely on may not work anymore.

In Business School, lessons learned on efficiency and how to drive for utmost efficiency are some common topics.

Efficiency seemed to be the key word if you want to be the top management leader.

Anyone who can show how to run an operation efficiently, others will look at him in high esteem and consider him the expert to keep the operation alive and popular.

But now? whether the efficient manager is highly regarded? that depends on a lot on whether he has some operational issues as a result of COVID-19 whereby almost everything comes to a standstill.

What is EIFFICENCY?

Efficiency is profit maximization with the lowest of cost and achieving it in the shortest time possible.

In good time and under normal condition, this seems to be a good doctrine to adhere to.

Any manager who can achieve results with the utmost efficiency is deemed to be the star performer.

Japanese coined the term – Just In Time management, This is the benchmark of efficiency at clockwork operation.

What is Resilience?

Resilience seems to be the opposite of efficiency in business world.

According to the definition in Marriam-Webster Dictionary :

Resilience is ability to recover to its original state or shape after some adverse conditions or something bad happen.

So in term of business, COVID-19 pandemic is a good example as almost all businesses are badly affected and whichever able to recover are considered to be very resilient.

Does Efficiency complement Resilience or contradict it?

We notice how COVID-19 had affected businesses over the last two years.

Some efficient companies seemed to do it badly as times go on since every thing seems to be on standstill.

Factories which used to be efficient were the hardest hit as they ran out of raw materials to manufacture.

They are not able to get the new supply in since suppliers also stopped working, so now the once efficient factories now are facing awkward situation.

They do not have enough to raw materials to produce, previously in their effort to cut down holding cost, they did not stock materials beyond what was required for production.

So is efficiency at the expense of resilience?

To be efficient, one of the common measure management take is to be lean and keep cost low.

However, COVID-19 rear up the ugly side of being efficient at the expense of resilience.

We can look at the following examples to have some ideas of how COVID-19 can provide a good case study on efficiency vs resilience.

1. Health care system.

For years, hospitals are trying to be profitable, be it public hospitals or private run hospitals, to do that, they will keep a tight rein on staffs especially on nurses and healthcare staffs.

During COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals are overwhelmed with patients and all these made the medical staffs stressed and overworked.

2. Logistic and Supply Chain

The current high cost of logistic and supply chain after the slowdown is very obvious.

During the height of the pandemic, some ports tried to be efficient during the good time and now are facing a lot of operational issues, due to the long jam and congestion as factories start ramming up their operation and cargo start to move again.

A lot of ships and tankers mothballed at harbor, at the height of it, you could see a lot in Singapore.

 

3. Construction industries

In the good time, construction firms try to be lean as possible and keep minimum workers especially migrant workers. With the pandemic, when people can not travel freely, and workers movement come to standstill, construction firms suddenly find they are in a jam, as their workers especially migrant workers can not report back to work once they have gone back to their home towns for a break.

Efficiency and Resilience as Optimization .

1. Efficiency is short term.

2. Resilience is long term.

Therefore, do you prefer a long term policy or a short term solution?

How do we balance the two in order to achieve the objectives we are looking for?

COVID-19 forced us to innovate and learn new ways to manage our businesses.

The best outcome from the pandemic is seeing most of the businesses decide to take steps to innovate.

Those businesses which are adaptable and creative are finding the challenge to innovate and improve.

The use of Artificial Intelligent is making the businesses more robust and sustainable, hopefully can survive another severe and critical situation like COVID-19

Some businesses emerge stronger and better prepared.

Others take the opportunity to be more efficient and thus becoming more profitable.

Conclusion

A good lesson learned from COVID-19 is to fuse efficiency with resilience, finding the middle path to make the business stronger.

Fareed Zakaria, WaPo, 10/’20:

“The pandemic upended the present. But it’s given us a chance to remake the future.”

If you have any comments and feedback, please feel free to leave your comments in the comments section below.

I will be glad to get back to you.

Do you have any experience which you wish to share about COVID-19 and how you tackle the pandemic in term of business operation,  do share your thought here.

 

What is an employee handbook?

Employee Handbook is a document prepared by a company or organization specifically for their employees.

It usually spells out the terms and conditions of the employment in the company or organization.

The hand book serves as the holy book of the company outlining the followings:

1. The mission of the company or organization.

2. Some will also include the vision of the company.

3. Policies, rules and regulations of the company are also included.

4. Terms and conditions of employment.

5. Codes of conducts.

6. Staff benefits.

Why is an employee handbook so important to the company?

for any new employee who just join a company, a good employee handbook will help him to acclimatize to the company faster.

A good Human Resource staff will save a lot of times if they have prepared a good employee handbook.

By giving a copy of the book for the newly hired, the recruit will understand the company better and know the culture of the company.

The newly hired will understand what benefits and what are the terms of the employment. In the nut shell, he knows what he is getting into.

Failure to have a comprehensive employee handbook

most of the time, companies do not see the need to have a handbook prepared.

They only realize how important and useful the handbook is when there is pressing issue on staffs matters, dispute in employee relation.

Some companies soon realize without a comprehensive employee handbook, there is something missing, such as company culture, organized

What are the purposes of the employee handbook?

1. Outlining the company’s vision and mission and value.

A company usually has its own vision and mission, some companies even have their value stated.

A good place to record the vision, mission and value of the company will be in the employee handbook.

By stating these in the handbook, the employees, especially the new recruits will be able to understand and buy in to the culture of the company.

2. Means to communicate to staffs of the company’s policies and procedures.

Instead of issuing the company’s policies and procedures separately and in piecemeal method, by having the policies and procedures included in the handbook, will be a better avenue to keep track of the various policies and procedures the company.

now and then a company may issue a policy or update its policy and the handbook is a better place to keep track of the changes.

3. Guidelines for company to ensure consistent enforcement of policies.

For a company to implement its policies and regulations consistently, it is easier if the handbook is readily available to record and indicate all the policies and regulations, whenever a decision needs to be made, the management can always refer to the handbook.

4. Benchmark for employees performance and appraisal.

In a handbook, company can always outline its staffs performance and appraisal benchmark. In the handbook also, usually one can note the grades of the staffs and what positions they can look forward to in terms of career advancement in the company.

5. Serve as the code of conducts for employees.

Usually the code of conduct is outlined in the handbook, any grievances and discipline issues can be referred to in the handbook.

For any employee who has violated the Codes of Conduct, the handbook is the right place to find out what action can be taken.

6. Avoidance of ambiguity of policies and regulations of the company.

When in doubt, refer to the handbook, that is what the management needs to do, so are the employees of the company.

Points of Pitfalls of Handbook to avoid.

1. Update the handbook regularly.

It is important that a handbook has to be updated regularly and those replaced sections should be deleted and removed from the handbook.

2. Avoid making the handbook becoming a cumbersome document.

A good handbook must be very effective communication tool, therefore it is important that it is not a cumbersome and thick document, usually when it is too thick, one tends to discard reading it.

3. Make policies which are easy to enforce.

Management must make sure the policies made are easily enforceable and not one which is too details and people have problem understand it.

it is better it can be written in plain language instead of having all the legal jargon.

4. Review and amend outdated policies to keep up with times.

with the changes of times and advancement of technology, management must update and review the contents of the handbook, so that the company has an updated version of the handbook.

5. Have separate sub hand book to cover relevant topics.

instead of putting all the topics in one thick handbook, management can try to separate the various topics and have sub handbook for ease of reference.

Management may want to consider having separate documents for the following:

a. Codes of Conducts.

b. Safety procedures.

c. training manual.

d. appraisal and recruitment procedures.

by having a separate document, the employees can refer to the relevant books for whenever they face some issues and the documents can be easily accessible by all staffs.

Finally it is important to make sure the company has a handbook which is in compliance with the government laws and regulations on employments, and managements.

When one starts a new business, the most commonly asked question is how to start and how to go about doing it.

In this technology age, a lot of start up are business related to Artificial Intelligence,

the peopled who start this are mostly peopled who have knowledge of computer programming and tech geeks,

most of the times, these people may be able to create a good application, but whether they are able to run and manage the new start up is up to the promoter of the business.

I have come across a few of these peopled who can invent some good applications, program but running the company? that is totally a different story.

Most of the technology start up failed because the owners do not have the necessary knowledge to run the business.

Why do the new tech start up fail?

1. The owner is too engrossed in the program.

2. No proper business plan is prepared.

3. Business owner fail to identify the market for his creation.

1. The owner is too engrossed in the program.

A lot of owners of the technology companies like to spend their time in the programming of their product and they are very passionate about this.

Most of the time they will spend their time fine-tuning their product and trying to make it as perfect as possible,

Because of this, they neglect their main task, the task of getting their business operating.

2. No proper business plan is prepared.

Most of the new start up do not know a proper business plan is important.

A good business plan acts as a guide for any business and can provide the following:

a. It gives the business a direction.

b. With the plan, the business can focus on achieving the target set.

c. it outlines clearly the targets to be achieved.

d. Enable the business to prepare and be more organized.

3. Business owner fail to identify the market for his creation

Business owner sometimes fail to identify the market, they just create the app and then try to market it.

there are tech businessmen who created the app and then only want to find out how to market the app instead of creating something required by any industries.

What Should Technology Companies Do In Creating An APP?

Before any app is programmed, it is advisable that the technology firm take the following steps:

1. Find out what application is badly required by any business

2. Create the app specially tailor to the demand of certain industries.

3. Make sure the app is user-friendly.

4. How the APP can help the business?

5. Whether the APP help to improve efficiency and productivity.

Before a business man wants to market a new APP, he must know how his APP can help the business he is targeting to sell the APP .

How useful and how the APP is able to help any business is another thing always overlooked by the APP developers, they may just create an APP which is so generic and thinking one size fits all will do.

This is just some pointers for new start up to consider.

If you have any comments and feedback, please feel free to leave your comments below.

Do you want to restructure your small medium enterprise and make it more profitable?

There are a lot of Small Medium Enterprise (SME) in Singapore, and most of them depend on the government to guide them, by providing subsidy and incentive through Enterprise Singapore, or previously commonly known as Spring Singapore, instead of going ahead to restructure the business to face the new challenges.

Instead of embarking on businesses where government is providing subsidy, a business entity should embark on a business after careful analysis and evaluation and determine the feasibility and profitability of the business, if not, we will lose focus on what we set out to do in the first place.

It seems that a lot of SME only take on business where government is providing subsidy and incentive, it gives the impression they are looking at collecting the goodies or really want to do the business?

Before a SME is restructured, the owner of the business must know what he wants for his business for the next few years or decades.

Why do we hardly see SME expand beyond Singapore and become Multi National Corporation or MNC?

There are quite a few reasons for that.

1. As mentioned above, a lot of them are in business or start the business because government is providing subsidy and incentive.
2. Lack of succession plan from the pioneer of the business, most of the time, the owner or operator of the SME find it difficult to continue the business as his children are not willing to take over the business and he does not have a professional manager to run the show for him.
3. Element of change and evolve with time is lacking, with the change of business environment especially with the COVID-19 pandemic affecting all sorts of businesses and life, there is a need to have new normal in the way business can operate and survive.
4. Most SME in Singapore were started in the last century and even though some may have been taken over by the children or the 2nd and 3rd generation, however will it be operated by the 4th generation or 5th? considering now the children seldom follow the parent to the office , even they do go to the office, they will still be busy with their mobile phone instead of observing what the parents are doing.

 

So how to make a SME change to MNC and expand beyond Singapore and move out from their comfort zone and find more challenging business in the region and beyond?

Can We Help?

If you are one of the SME who is thinking of expanding and taking the next step to become a better business entity and one which employees like and enjoy working in, do contact us and we can work out the plan for you.

What Else Do We Offer?

At the same time you may want to subscribe to our short business solutions in our Lazy People Guide and learn a thing or two, if you are interested, you can click HERE to learn more.

In the current situation, most companies may want to have a business restructuring to ensure their survival and more prepared when the economy business environment return to normal

Companies may want to look at

1. 1. Business Improvement.
2. 2. Financial Restructuring.
3. 3. Business Reorganization
4. 4. Information Technology
5. 5. Merger & Acquisition
6. 6. Valuation of company value.

1. Business Improvement

Astutebizadvisory place a lot of emphasis on business strategy planning, improving and executing business strategies and processes. The main objective is to ensure the Corporate Objectives are in line with the Stakeholders’ need.

For Business Improvement, Astutebizadvisory
offer two methods of achieving the desired objectives.

a. Business Process Improvement.

I. Process improvement

We will advise clients on how to improve the business process to make it more efficient and lean. We are confident after our process review and implementation of our recommendation, the business process will be more efficient and lean, not to mention the savings made and the capacity increased as a result of the process improvement. The business may also be able to keep their staffs and enable the staffs to learn more and in-depth of the business process.

II. Business Intelligence Information.

We will analyze your business data and reorganize the data to create a monitoring process whereby the data are put to better use in business process and decision-making. In this era of big data information where data is asset, if the available data is put to good use in combination with business process improvement, it will produce a sustainable result.

2. Financial Restructuring.

In this challenging business environment, it is important to do some financial restructuring of the business.

We assist clients who are in financial difficulty to restructure their financial by negotiating with the creditors, conduct going concern review and recommend sustainable financial prudence steps to ensure the business can sustain the difficult and challenging business climate.

3. Business Reorganization.

In the time of need, we can assist our client to do business reorganization and help our clients to be more competitive and stabilize the operation and identify better business opportunity.

4. Information Technology

We help our client to leverage on Information Technology (IT), to improve business performance and reduce business risk.

We have IT professional who constantly work with us to help our clients in new IT system implementation and/or system integration and we help our client to identify their IT risk and also on data protection in accordance with Personal Data Protection Act.

5. Merger & Acquisition.

We will help to identify the target for merger and acquisition and will follow through the entire process of the transaction.

We provide the following services:

• Acquisition and divestiture plans and strategies.
• Due diligence
• Integration and assimilation process.

We will ensure our client get their value of investment for the merger and acquisition and we will try to maximize the value for our client.

6. Valuation of Company Value.

We do valuation of business, business interests and intangible asset valuation for our client.

We can provide intangible asset valuation for our client in a business combination in accordance with IFRS No. 3 on Business Combination.

Determination of the fair value of Goodwill and perform test on potential impairment are also the services provided by us.