Growth in the furniture industry is found in wood furniture manufacturing. By increasing their emphasis on improving quality controls and stressing price points and basic styling features, manufacturers’ dollar sales grew by 2.5 percent in 2007. Dollar sales were forecasted to increase by 4 percent in 2008. The size of the industry is relatively small with only about 1,000 furniture manufacturers operating in the United States. Ten U.S. manufacturers, representing about one-third of furniture industry dollar sales, account for about 28 percent of total industry sales.
Next instead of promoting from within, they searched for new blood and hired former Barney’s CEO Allen Questrom. Penney went on to sell one it’s direct marketing unit to raise capital to reduce debt. They restructured the company to focus on its struggling department stores, cutting employees and closing down many stores. By September 29, 2003, the culmination of CalPERS active investment in Penney, JC Penney seemed to right the ship and was able to streamline operations to be more efficient and profitable. Chronology of Events 2/22/00: CalPERS identifies 10 underperforming companies that will serve as their primary focus for corporate governance activism for the 2000 proxy season.
Industry sales of children and juvenile books for 2009 were $3.2 billion (AAP, 2009). Since the staff and employees are X and Y’ers with young families, adding these titles to the product portfolio is a sound strategic move. The demographics give CanGo insight into the most popular titles and the capital expenditure for additional space is addressed by the ASRS systems. While hardcopy book sales declined in 2009, sales of e-books increased. In fact there are 500,000 book titles available for electronic readers and according to the AAP e-book sales increased by 176% in 2009 and Audio book sales totaled $192 million (AAP, 2009) making the addition of e-books and Audio books to their portfolio a logical strategic move.
With this happening, D.D. Williamson decided to search for additional process changes. The company decided to simplify the criteria ratings by rating projects at the level of the corporate goals, the nature of the team, and the perceived possibilities that the projects would encounter difficulties that would require senior level management support to prevail over. In result, the aim and implementation of new plans for D. D. Williamson seems to be a better success rate for their larger projects. For future reference, D. D. Williamson has now industrialized opportunities for project managers to take on a VIP.
Sales were up 11 percent from 2009’s second quarter. Third quarter 2009 sales reflect the $276 million impact of a 7 percent decline in tire unit volume due to lower industry demand as well as a $279 million reduction in sales in other tire-related businesses, primarily third-party chemical sales by North American Tire. Unfavorable foreign currency translation further reduced sales by $159 million. Goodyear successfully launched 15 new products in the quarter, in addition to the 42 launched in the first half. The company has exceeded its goal of more than 50 new product launches during 2009.
Fisher Price has many years of building and designing their products and promoting from within and they have a professional management team from several different industries. Also, recent acquirement of the company from the Quaker Oat’s company permitted financial firmness and support. The company had also seen a 742% increase in the last ten years which exemplifies its profitability. Lastly, the company is able to provide variety to the public. On the other hand, Fischer Price has a few weaknesses; one being that the current management is unwilling to welcome change.
This is the search for, and execution of, sweeping change in business processes to attain breakthrough improvements in products and services. The first step would be to identify key business methods which are the structured set of measurable activities designed to produce a specific output. Why shouldn’t Petrie’s staff build their own unique system in-house? From the list of requirements, it was clear that Petrie’s staff should seek outside IT consulting to build their system. Doing it in-house would be too expensive and time consuming, not to mention, building a system like this in-house is an antiquated practice and they shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel.
Looking only at the income statement of Horniman, it seemed to be impressive at every aspect, especially strong revenue growth, better cost management, and improved profit margins. However, if someone takes a look at their balance sheet, he or she may notice that the biggest concern for Horniman is a low level of their cash balance. In the recent year, the company had only $9,400 cash on their hands, which was far below the operating target of 8% of annual revenue. The company’s cash balance had been eroding sharply since 2004, which was related to their sharp increases in revenue. There are many possible reasons to explain why the company’s cash had been eroding over the two-year period.
Unemployment rates were steadily on the rise just a few months ago and corporate profits are at all time highs. This will lead to companies not hiring workers and a sluggish job recovery rate. Technology is replacing the uneducated worker at an alarming rate as machines increase labor productivity faster than other areas of the economy can absorb the now surplus of labor. This doesn’t mean we need to slow technology, just that we need to be a more educated society. Another link to the great depression would be the precious metals market.
Still, Grassner’s main concern was that directors might become complacent if their targets were easier to achieve. Gassner proposed that business plans and bonus targets for each country needed to be modified, while regional managers didn’t want to take it even into consideration. On the one hand, I have to agree with Gassner that they should change the business targets for each country to reflect the new manufacturing price, and then using these figures as the basis for calculating the managing directors’ bonuses. This route would be the best for the company, preventing employees from complacency, but more importantly holding managing directors accountable for their own performance. BMG International should take full advantage of these savings, and use the $20 million in a way that benefits the company as a whole.