Analyzing Two Business Plans To Increase Profit And Productivity

Strengths and weaknesses of Quality Training’s business plan

The firms irrespective of their industries aim to increase their employee productivity and profits. The paper would consider two firms namely, Quality Training from training service industry and B&A Toy Warehouse from toy and logistics industry. It would analyse how these two firms can increase their profits and productivity.

The business aim of Quality Training is to provide high quality training and development services to its clients. Quality training is a private limited company and hence seeks to management its resources towards business operations to earn high profits and incur minimum debts. The areas where the organisation offers training are retail, business administration, frontline management, Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) and logistics (Goetsch and Davis 2014). The firm seeks to provide quality training services and certificates to its clients in these areas, maintain long-term relationships with them and obtain references from them to expand the existing business. The business plan further shows that the main strength of the firm is its low cost of operations and flexibility to adapt to the client needs (Konings and Vanormelingen 2015). The weaknesses of the firm are its limited financial resources and client base with no reference network, which in turn limits like revenue generation.

1. Increase in the number of clients
2. Increase in repeat business.
3. Maximisation of revenue generation.
4. Decrease of liabilities

KPI	Reports/Sources/Documents	Measurement indicator(s) Save Time On Research and Writing Hire a Pro to Write You a 100% Plagiarism-Free Paper. Get My Paper
Increase in the number of clients	Client register, Profit and loss statement, CRM	1. Increase in the numbers of students registering for the courses. 2. Increase in the numbers of corporate clients registering for the courses. 3. Increase in revenue earned evident from profit and loss account.
Increase in repeat business.	Client register, Profit and loss statement, CRM	1. Increase in the numbers of students registering for the courses. 2. Increase in the numbers of corporate clients registering for the courses. 3. Increase in revenue earned evident from profit and loss account.
Maximisation of revenue generation.	Profit and loss statement, Balance sheet	1. Increase in revenue earned evident from profit and loss account. 2. Increase in the current assets of the company showing increase in bank balance owing to increase in income from registration.
Decrease of liabilities	Balance sheet	Decrease in the current liabilities in the balance sheet.

The acceptable level of variance for the planned activities would be around 10 percent. The measurement indicators show that they are based on financial statements like profit and loss account and financial results like income from registration (Georgiadis and Pitelis 2016). Since, the results financial performance varies from year to year; a variance of 10 percent would be accepted.

The time frame for completing the measure report of the KPIs would be a year. This is because the statements like profit and loss account for the year are published annually. Moreover, the organisation would require data from a sufficiently long time to arrive at conclusions regarding the KPI performances (Howard, Turban and Hurley 2016). Hence, considering the above facts, it is prudent to take into financial data for a year to arrive at a strong decision regarding the KPIs.

The benchmark to be used to measure the performance of the KPIs in increase in profits would be the figures in the financial statements. For example, if the profit and loss account from the operations of the second year increases compared to the first year, it would show increase in the profitability which would act as a benchmark for improving financial performances (Dhar 2015).

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Quality Training

1. The management of Quality Training Private Limited.
2.  The employees
3.  The shareholders
4. The clients

A review of the case study of B&A Toy Warehouse shows that it is a warehouse which experiences average employee productivity, high rate of turnover of employees and needed to implement measures to improve its productivity. Thus, it can be recommended that the management of the warehouse should train employees on new machineries to improve their productivity.

Area	Required corrective action
Time Average order processing time	B&A Toy Warehouse should install new machinery which would be able to process more inputs during a given time. For example, make 55 toys a day compared to 50 toys per day compared to the present machinery. The firm as an adaptive measure should train the employees to operate the new machinery (Anitha 2014).
Cost Average cost to process an order	The new machinery should also use less electricity, thus, minimising the average cost of production of toys. The finance department should always maintain contingency fund to replace machine parts in case of breakdown to minimise loss of production and raising average cost of production (Sykes, Venkatesh and Johnson 2014).
Quality Error rate	The new machinery must be attached to a computer with software installed to it. The manufacturing manager should check the error rate in production of toys and take corrective measures promptly.
Production Average number of orders processed per day	The installation of new machinery and fall in the error rate would results in reduction in defective pieces of toys. This would consequently raise the production per day. The production manager must conduct interim check of productivity to ensure that the machine contributes to increase in it (Mostafa, Gould?Williams and Bottomley 2015).

1(a): The following are the areas of non-performances of B&A Toy Warehouse:

1. The firm had 20 percent employees who were unaware about the level of performance they had to achieve. This prevented them from achieving the satisfactory levels of performances.
2. The KPIs of the employee performances were aligned to organisational goals and SMART framework.
3. The warehouse authorities did not take action to improve the performances of the 50 percent employees who underperformed.

2(a):  The system failures which led to the poor performance of the warehouse are:

Communication failure:

There were communication gaps between the managers and their subordinates. This is evident from less than 85 percent of employee engagement and low productivity of 50 toys instead of 55 toys per day.

Planning failure:

 The managers did not plan the number of people working in particular shifts. This impacted productivity when a number of employees went on leave or resigned.

 One can point out that there were reporting and decision making gaps within the organisational departments. The high employee turnover shows that there were gaps between the reporting of employee forecasts by the departmental heads to the HR department. This resulted in inappropriate recruitment that ultimately led to high employee turnover (Mostafa, Gould?Williams and Bottomley 2015).

The employees operating the machines were not trained or mentored by mangers when they performed low and the productivity went down. The staffs did not receive training on Forklift equipments which hindered them from achieving high productivity. The Union members also hindered training of staff on Forklift which hindered productivity (Hovland and Lumsdaine 2017).

The performance indicators like time and cost stated above are suitable to measure the performance improvement of the employees. However, the manager might change the KPI table by adding one more items to achieve organisational goal of higher productivity. It is productivity per employee which would show the efficiency of employees in producing toys from the machinery (Sykes, Venkatesh and Johnson 2014).

1. The managers should train the staff to work on the new modern machinery to improve their productivity.
2. The HR and the managers should motivate the employees to get involved in activities like decision making. These initiatives would reduce absenteeism, employee turnover and boost productivity (Fleming and Koppelman 2016).
3. The management of the B&A Toy Warehouse should act strongly towards reducing union intervention in the day to day operation of the company like training of employees on Forklift. This would ensure that the employees are under the control of the company which would ultimately boost productivity (McNair 2017).

1. The performance measures identified are time, cost, quality, error and production.  After redefining the performance measure, the sixth measure would be productivity per employee.

1. The departmental heads should identify the development needs of subordinate teams and members individually like the need for employees to train on Forklift machinery to improve productivity.
2. The departmental heads and supervisors should identify the coaching needs and mentor the employees to motivate them.
3. The managers should present the development and training to the management and relevant departments like finance for approval to arrange for training (Leach 2014).

1. The departmental heads should set achievement standards which every employee should achieve.

2 They should measure the actual performance against this standard and arrange for training of weak employees.

The implementation of training and developmental plans would motivate the employees and boost their confidence. These initiatives would motivate them to attain higher performance standards (Hovland and Lumsdaine 2017).

Conclusion:

The discussion above clearly shows that the two firms namely, Quality Assurance and B&A Toy Warehouse should train their employees to increase their productivity. Moreover, they in the case study remain silent about their marketing activities, which is one of the strategic tools companies can use to boost productivity. Hence, it can be suggested that these two should market their products to attract customers and increase revenue generation.

References:

Anitha, J., 2014. Determinants of employee engagement and their impact on employee performance. International journal of productivity and performance management.

Burgoon, J.K., Guerrero, L.K. and Floyd, K., 2016. Nonverbal communication. Routledge.

Dhar, R.L., 2015. Service quality and the training of employees: The mediating role of organizational commitment. Tourism Management, 46, pp.419-430.

Fleming, Q.W. and Koppelman, J.M., 2016, December. Earned value project management. Project Management Institute.

Georgiadis, A. and Pitelis, C.N., 2016. The Impact of Employees’ and Managers’ Training on the Performance of Small?and Medium?Sized Enterprises: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Experiment in the UK Service Sector. British Journal of Industrial Relations, 54(2), pp.409-421.

Goetsch, D.L. and Davis, S.B., 2014. Quality management for organizational excellence. Upper Saddle River, NJ: pearson.

Hovland, C.I. and Lumsdaine, A.A., 2017. Experiments on mass communication. Princeton University Press.

Howard, L.W., Turban, D.B. and Hurley, S.K., 2016. Cooperating teams and competing reward strategies: Incentives for team performance and firm productivity. Journal of Behavioral and Applied Management, 3(3).

Konings, J. and Vanormelingen, S., 2015. The impact of training on productivity and wages: firm-level evidence. Review of Economics and Statistics, 97(2), pp.485-497.

Leach, L.P., 2014. Critical chain project management. Artech House.

McNair, B., 2017. An introduction to political communication. Taylor & Francis.

Sykes, T.A., Venkatesh, V. and Johnson, J.L., 2014. Enterprise system implementation and employee job performance: Understanding the role of advice networks. MIS quarterly, 38(1). Mostafa, A.M.S., Gould?Williams, J.S. and Bottomley, P., 2015. High?performance human resource practices and employee outcomes: the mediating role of public service motivation. Public Administration Review, 75(5), pp.747-757.