Well, it’s not my responsibility to analyze a company which always mess up. I have worked for my company almost 2 years, seeing it growing from a small area with only 4 part time employees to a bigger one with 12 employees (10 part-time and 2 full-time). An amazing thing is that it can grow bigger and bigger even though it has many problems. And my boss – a 30 year-old young and smart guy – has been trying some way to get everything on the right track. However, it’s really a tough job. We have a manager but he is gradually overwhelmed by a bunch of un-named duties and responsibilities – maybe one day he would escape as some people did before.
What are main issues and how can such a company be managed?
1. Inventory: We can’t control inventory well now. We are just a small company selling stuff on eBay. Amazon is a big business – what have they done to control their stock? Are their supplies reliable and stable? And their warehouse should be much much bigger but they can still control. My boss tried to write a software to control inventory but it doesn’t work effectively. He has a master degree in IT, he can do better if he has more time to make it more adaptable to his expanding business. But he has no time. Buying inventory control software was considered but no software can meet his requirements. As a result, problems relating to inventory have never been solved.
What can an employer do in this case?
2. Costs/Expenses: I believe the most expense would be in inventory. We can see expenses arising everywhere, from the items can’t be shipped due to many reasons such as shipping staffs’ negligence, broken problems, redundancy, out-of-date devices, and so on, to mistakes continuously taking place in every sections/departments. More mistakes, more time and money waste. How to prevent mistakes? Like my boss said, we should do everything right at the beginning. The beginning starts from controlling supplies, which is beyond his ability. Therefore, now he changed the strategy: “we can’t do things right at the beginning, so an excellent customer service would solve any consequences”. I don’t think it is a good idea, ’cause it takes time to keep track cases, wastes a lot of money which wouldn’t if we do things right from the beginning, and discourages people because no one like running after every mistake to solve it.
Recently monthly wages/salaries have been considered as a significant cost, effecting the business profit. A lot of money has been spent on labor but nothing can’t be improved. When sales is going down, this issue shows up clearer. As a result, a strategy of outsourcing customer service team abroad (Asia) has been deployed because Asian workers are smart guys, have good English language, a lot of free time to keep track problems and a high spirit of self-study. Especially, they are willing to accept a payment which equals to one-third of that of a part-time employee in the U.S. That means, with a payment for one staff here, the boss can hire 3 people in Philippine. Yeah, Asia countries have advantage of cheap labor, but in this case, I don’t believe that oursourcing customer service abroad is a good solution. Only companies with reliable and stable systems can do that, but not this company. We depends very much on eBay Blackthorn , Dazzle systems, and operations of U.S carriers such as USPS and Fedex. If they don’t work well, 100 staffs abroad can be nothing and it would be a big waste.
What are managers often do to reduce the expense? Re-organizing the warehouse to make it more effective (how?), re-structuring the human resource (lay off some employees but who will be cut because most of us work part-time ; re-arrange working schedules – maybe, and it is an easiest way, setting up a reasonable reward and punishment policy – not easy, cause we don’t have any system to keep track and evaluate employee’s productivity); assign a real power to manager – by what way?) …
Cont…
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