supervision today

What is Productivity?

in its simplest form, productivity can be expressed in the following ratio:

         Productivity = output / (labor + capital + materials).

Output per labor hour is perhaps the most common partial measure of productivity. Industrial engineers, who conduct time-and-motion studies in factories, largely focus on generating increases in labor productivity. IBM’s automated plant in Austin, Texas, is an example of increasing productivity by substituting capital (that is, machinery and equipment) for labor. Materials productivity is concerned with increasing the efficient use of material inputs and supplies. A meat-packing plant, as an illustrative case, improves its materials productivity when it finds additional uses for by-products that were preciously treated as waste.

Productivity can also be applied to three different levels-the individual, the group, and the total organization. Word-processing software, fax machines, and e-mail have made administrative assistants more productive by following them to generate more output during their work days. The use of teams has increased the productivity of many work groups at companies such as Coors Brewing and Aetna Life. Southwest’s cost per available seat-mile is 30 to 60 percent lower than that of these competitors.

Why Is Productivity Important to the United States?

What is the Breadth of Planning?

Strategic planning covers the entire organization, it includes establishing overall goals and positioning the organization’s products or services against the competition. Wal-Mart’s strategy, for instance, is to build large stores in rural areas, offer an extensive selection of merchandise, provide the lowest prices, and then draw consumers from the many surrounding small towns.

Tactical planning covers the specific details on how overall goals are to be achieved. The Wal-Mart store manager in Fayetteville, Arkansas, is engaged in tactical planning when developing a quarterly expense budget or making out weekly employee work schedules.

  For the most part, strategic planning is done by top-level manager; a supervisor’s time is more likely devoted to tactical planning. Both are important for an organization’s success, bit they are different in that one focuses on the big picture, while the other emphasizes the specifics within that big picture.

How do planning time frames differ?

Planning often occurs in three time frames—short term, intermediate term, and long term. Short-term plans are less than one year in length. Intermediate-term plans cover from one to five years. Lon-term plans cover a period of more than five years. A supervisor’s planning horizon tends to emphasize the short term: preparing plans for the nest month, week, or day. People in middle-level managerial jobs, such as regional sales directors, typically focus on one-to three-year plans. Long=term planning tends to be done by the top executives, such as vice-presidents and above.

How are plans and supervisory level linked?

It is important to remember that effective planning is integrated and coordinated throughout the organization. Long0term strategic planning set the direction for all other planning. Once top management has defined the organization’s overall strategy and goals and the general plan for getting there, then, in descending order, the other levels of the organization develop plans.

Management Positions (abbreviated)

Long-Term

Strategic

Short-Term 

Intermediate

this linking of plans from the top to the bottom of an organization. The president, vice-president, and other senior executives define the organization’s overall strategy. Then upper-middle managers, such as regional sales directors, formulate their plans. This continues down to first-line supervisors. Ideally, these plans will be coordinated through joint participation. In the case shown in Exhibit 3-2, for instance, the Tucson territory supervisor would participate with other territory supervisors in providing information and ideas to the Arizona district manager as she formulates plans for her entire district. If planning is properly linked, then the successful achievement of all the territory managers’ goals should result in the Arizona district manager achieving her goals. If all the district managers meet their manager’s goals, and so on up each level in the organization.

Something to think about (and promote class discussion)

Gathering competitive information:

Knowing as much as you can about your competition is simply good business sense. But how far can you go to obtain that information? It’s clear that over the past few years, competitive intelligence activities have increased-but sometimes these same well-intended actions have crossed the line to corporate spying. For example, when a company pays for information that was obtained by someone who hacked another company’s computer system, receiving that data is illegal. By the new millennium, nearly fifteen hundred U.S. companies had been victims of some type of corporate espionage, resulting in more than $300 billion in losses for these organization.

Most individuals do understand the difference between what is legal and what’s not.