Professional Qualities For Ethics And Social Responsibility In Engineering Management

Project Context

Discuss about the Professional Qualities for Ethics and Social Responsibility.

The engineering management professionals have to be ethical in their approach. They are responsible and accountable in intervene the daily activities of the team members. They adopt a crucial role in balancing the business interests with the well-being of the team members. They are the virtuous managers those are responsible for making team members adhere to the rules and regulations within the organization (Alotaibi, Lohse & Vu, 2016). The engineering management professionals also manage in providing responsibilities to each of the members of the groups. They are responsible for prevalent mutual trust and belief among the employees so that the employees feel to be a part of the organization.

The engineering management professional have a combined working force of technology and management. With the combined skills and talents, the professional can understand each of the technologies used in the completion of a project and also utilizes his/her management skills in managing the team members (Johnston & Marshall, 2016). Moreover, several projects are also taken care of regarding their requirement of the technologies, time taken for their completion and in understanding the talents and skills of the team members.

The engineering management professional has to take the responsibility of the employees in the organization. They have to make unbiased decisions regarding the welfare of the team members. They have to be flexible regarding making prompt decisions in cases of emergencies at the workplace. They are responsible for overall conduct of the employees so that they complete each of the assigned activities within specified period of time (Ferguson et al. 2016). They have to conduct training and motivational sessions to retain the employees’ motivation level. They are also responsible for managing the inventories and the resources that are available to make the best use of it in making unbiased and responsible decisions.

The engineering management professionals have to be multi-tasking in their approach. Starting right from managing the team to managing the inventory and availability of the resources, each of these activities is managed by the professional (Paul, Sridharan & Ramanan, 2016). They have to multi-tasking as each of the activities within the team is to be managed by the professional. They have to be prompt in their decisions and are also responsible for scheduling the various jobs as per priority and time.

There are various role tensions of engineering management professional in an organization. They have to be cautious about any of the abrupt situations that the team members are likely to face when involved in the projects. They have to be maintaining the sanity and rationality of the team members and also have to maintain a good relationship with them (Muralidharan & Kumar, 2016). Moreover, it is seen that when the team members get such to any activities and problems cannot be resolved; the professional have to use his/her management and technical skills for solving the problems and conveying the message to the customers. Even more, the professional also informs the higher authorities for help in resolving the problems faced by the team regarding the projects. 

Usage of Innovative Technology

One of the major issues that the MNCs face in managing inventory is its failure in planning. A planning failure leads to a huge problem in managing the inventory, especially in the seasonal businesses. As per example during Christmas season, Tesco merchandises several gifts, cards, and cakes for the customers (Chan, Choi & Ho, 2016). It needs to have a concrete planning to store the products in its inventory through understanding and estimating the critical sales period. The inventory should be managed in such a way that products and edibles don’t get spoiled and also meets up the regular demand for it. 

Another major issue faced by the MNS’s inventory management is in the failure of keeping track of the inventories. It is the responsibility of the inventory manager to keep track the incoming and outgoing inventories along with the keeping tracks of the perishable food items. A visual and computerized inspection of the products needs to be kept on a daily basis in the MNC’s like Tesco for keeping and maintaining a track for the inventories (Disney et al. 2016). If the inventory manager fails to do so, the food items may get expired and poisoned due to crossing the time-period of storage and the inventories may be full of products those have very low selling proportion.

The MNC’s like Tesco have to maintain and manage the inventory and warehouse of the organization. It is because; a failure in managing the inventory may lead to excessive buying of the raw materials and finished products. With the changing market environment, Tesco has to keep pace with the changing and dynamic purchasing behavior of the customers. A bulk buying of the products may lead to a loss to Tesco if the products remain unsold (Gandhi et al. 2017). It, therefore, may cause a loss to Tesco when these products are sold at huge discounted prices. In the case of food items, the entire food inventory has to be thrown out by Tesco buying these in bulk quantities.

The business environment is a dynamic one and the customers’ wants and desires changes frequently. Tesco has to keep pace with this changing environment. The issue or problem in Tesco arises when the inventory manager fails to understand the changing market and buys products in bulks (Govindan et al. 2015). It may lead to a huge loss to Tesco due to the inventory manager’s failure in keeping pace with the changing trends of the patrons.

Flexibility, Unbiased and Responsibility

The vendors and suppliers will try to send raw materials and products of bad quality at the best premium prices. An issue arises when the inventory manager fails to monitor the vendors and their products those are getting supplied to Tesco warehouses (Hübner, Kuhn & Wollenburg, 2016). The inventory manager’s failure in the inspection of both the quality and quantity of the products sent by the vendors may cause a failure to the MNC’s like Tesco. It also hampers the brand name and reputation of the organization.

The aim and objective of the project are in understanding the several problems that the inventory manager faces at the workplace.

• What are the problems the inventory managers are likely to face in the workplace?
• What are the responsibilities of the inventory managers?

The lack of time is one of the major problems that led to the gaps in the literature review. Due to time constraint, the researcher was not able to understand the problems faced by the inventory managers of Tesco (Adams et al. 2016). A lack of face to face interviews with them also made the problem in understanding the difficulties they had to face while managing the inventory in recent times.

Due to lack of budget, the researcher had to stick to secondary research and had to take the opinions of the other researchers. Due to lack of budget, the researcher was unable to conduct any personal interactions with the inventory managers of Tesco. Hence, there are chances of biased research (Nolan & Garavan, 2016). 

The lack of communication between the market research team, inventory managers, and the higher officials create problems in Tesco. Several conflicts arise due to the lack of misunderstanding among the employees due to understanding the trend, planning and keeping track to the inventories. Conflicts may arise when the inventories get over-stocked with some items those have less demand and under-stocked with items that have high demand (Cumberland et al. 2016).

The biases of the inventory managers towards some vendors many create a problem in Tesco. The biases create conflicts when the suppliers supply low-quality raw materials and charge the premium price for it (Tate et al. 2014). Moreover, the inventory manager may also show biases to the suppliers when they fail to supply the products within given time. At that time, the suppliers provide the managers with some gifts to gain their biased side.

The Gantt chart shows the improvement of the inventory managers in their respective work. These improvements help in reducing the gaps in their work and improve the effectiveness of the work (Wood, Coe & Wrigley, 2016). Moreover, with better inventory management and approach, the inventory managers help in improving the workflow of the organization.

Activities	1-2 weeks	2-4 weeks	4-6 weeks	6-8 weeks
Learning to plan	·
Learning to keep track of the inventories	·	·
Improve Competency and keeping up with the market pace		·	·
Monitoring the Vendors’ activities		·	·	·

Multi-Tasking and Decision Making Framework

References

Adams, R. J., Smart, P., & Huff, A. S. (2016). Shades of grey: guidelines for working with the grey literature in systematic reviews for management and organizational studies. International Journal of Management Reviews.

Alotaibi, A., Lohse, N., & Vu, T. M. (2016). Dynamic Agent-based Bi-objective Robustness for Tardiness and Energy in a Dynamic Flexible Job Shop. Procedia CIRP, 57, 728-733.

Chan, H. L., Choi, T. M., & Ho, Y. M. (2016). How consumer demand affects order quantity in practice: an empirical study on inventory management decisions in fashion retailing. International Journal of Inventory Research, 3(2), 102-114.

Cumberland, D. M., Herd, A., Alagaraja, M., & Kerrick, S. A. (2016). Assessment and Development of Global Leadership Competencies in the workplace: a review of literature. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 18(3), 301-317.

Disney, S. M., Maltz, A., Wang, X., & Warburton, R. D. (2016). Inventory management for stochastic lead times with order crossovers. European Journal of Operational Research, 248(2), 473-486.

Ferguson, A. J., Cohen, L. E., Burton, M. D., & Beckman, C. M. (2016). Misfit and milestones: Structural elaboration and capability reinforcement in the evolution of entrepreneurial top management teams. Academy of Management Journal, 59(4), 1430-1450.

Gandhi, A. V., Gandhi, A. V., Shaikh, A., Shaikh, A., Sheorey, P. A., & Sheorey, P. A. (2017). Impact of supply chain management practices on firm performance: Empirical evidence from a developing country. International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, 45(4), 366-384.

Govindan, K., Rajendran, S., Sarkis, J., & Murugesan, P. (2015). Multi criteria decision making approaches for green supplier evaluation and selection: a literature review. Journal of Cleaner Production, 98, 66-83.

Hübner, A., Kuhn, H., & Wollenburg, J. (2016). Last mile fulfilment and distribution in omni-channel grocery retailing: a strategic planning framework. International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, 44(3), 228-247.

Johnston, M. W., & Marshall, G. W. (2016). Sales force management: Leadership, innovation, technology. Routledge.

Muralidharan, S., & Kumar, N. S. (2016). An Empirical Investigation on Talent Turn Over, Person job Fit and Person Organization Fit-Identification of Gaps Between Perceived and Expected Skills Among The Engineering, Arts and Science College Professors in Tamilnadu. International Journal of Management, IT and Engineering, 6(7), 74-80.

Nolan, C. T., & Garavan, T. N. (2016). Human resource development in SMEs: a systematic review of the literature. International Journal of Management Reviews, 18(1), 85-107.

Paul, M., Sridharan, R., & Ramanan, T. R. (2016). A multi-objective decision-making framework using preference selection index for assembly job shop scheduling problem. International Journal of Management Concepts and Philosophy, 9(4), 362-387.

Tate, W. L., Ellram, L. M., Schoenherr, T., & Petersen, K. J. (2014). Global competitive conditions driving the manufacturing location decision. Business Horizons, 57(3), 381-390.

Wood, S., Coe, N. M., & Wrigley, N. (2016). Multi-scalar localization and capability transference: exploring embeddedness in the Asian retail expansion of Tesco. Regional Studies, 50(3), 475-495.