1.
Setting a high price for a new product to make maximum revenue before competing products
appear on the market…………………………………….. (02 words) market skimming
2. Many large manufacturing companies have ,
including specialized production, finance, marketing, sales, and HR departments. functional
structure (02 words)
3. is a management function that includes anticipating trends and
determining the best strategies and tactics to achieve organizational goals and objectives. (01
word) planning
4. The length of time that lapses between placing an order for something and receiving it is called
. (02 words lead time
5. A statement showing the differences between the revenues and expenses of a period is called
. (02 words) income statement
6. is an approach to quality
that requires the involvement of all employees in a business. (03 words) total quality
management
7. is the application of moral principles in a given
situation. (2 words) ethical behavior
8. The of production involves the Earth’s natural
resources; activities in this stage include farming, fishing, forestry and the extraction of natural
materials, such as oil and copper ore. (2 words) primary stage
9. The area of logistics that involves bringing raw materials, packaging, other goods and services,
and information from suppliers to producers is called
. (2 words) inbound logistics.
10. When the majority of potential buyers have tried or accepted a product, the market is saturated,
and the product reaches its . (2 words) maturity
stage
11. Capital that shareholders have contributed to the company above the nominal or par value of the
stock is called . (3 words)
additional paid-in capital
12. A follows the footstep of the market leader and
avoid forceful competition. (2 words) market follower
13. is when a debt comes due and all principal and/or
interest must be repaid to creditors. (2 words) maturity date
14. Profit relating to a company's normal activities of providing goods or services, before tax is
deducted is called . (2 words) operating profit
15. is an introduction given to a new employee,
explaining the business’s activities, customs and procedures and introducing them to their fellow
workers. (2 words) induction training
16. Dividing a market into distinct groups of buyers who have different requirements or buying
habits is . (02 words) market segmentation
17. A system of authority with different levels, one above the other, e.g. a series of management
positions whose holders can make decisions, or give orders and instructions is
called . (max. 03 words) hierarchy/ chain of
command
18. is called a management function that involves establishing clear
standards to determine whether or not an organization is progressing toward its goals and
objectives, rewarding people for doing a good job, and taking corrective action if they are not.
(01 word) controlling
19. The production of very large quantities of identical goods using a continuously moving process
is called . (02 words) flow production
20. A statement showing the value of a business's assets, its liabilities, and its capital or shareholders'
equity (money the business has that belongs to its owners) is called
. (02 words) balance sheet
21. is the checking for quality standards throughout
the production process, whether it is the production of a product or service. (02 words) quality
assurance
22. is a stated opinion about the right thing to do in a
particular situation. (2 words) ethical stance
23. The of production involves providing services to
both consumers and other businesses; activities in this stage include transport, banking, retail,
insurance, hotels and hairdressing. (2 words) tertiary stage
24. are all the money that a company will have to pay to someone else in
the future, including debts, taxes and interest payments. (1 word) Liabilities
25. The area of logistics that involves managing the flow of finished products and information to
business buyers and ultimate consumers (people like you and me) is called
. (2 words) outbound logistics
26. A product enters the when it begins to be
replaced by new ones, due to advances in technology, or to changes in fashions and tastes. (2
words) decline stage
27. A tries to break the existing market leader
position and take its place. (2 words) market challenger
28. The ability of a company to meet its long-term debts and financial obligations is called
. (1 word) solvency
29. is the process from identifying that the business needs to employ
someone up to the point at which applications have arrived at the business. (1 word)
Recruitment
30. The value that a company has in addition to its assets, such as a reputation with its customers is
called . (1 word) goodwill
1. What is product placement? What does it mean?
Suggested answer: Product placement is a marketing technique that promotes a brand by
placing the branded product in a non-advertising context, usually a TV show or a movie. The
product is inserted into the program and is often seen as a natural part of it. The product or
brand can be seen in the background, mentioned in the narrative or be part of the action. The
appearance can be paid or not paid, depending on the specific agreement between both parties.
Product placement has been steadily growing as a marketing technique and now most firms
intensively use it to promote their brands.
2. Please differentiate depreciation and amortisation.
Suggested answer: 'Depreciation' and 'Amortization' are very similar, and are often used in the
same way. However, 'depreciation' can refer to the loss in value of a tangible asset (eg a
vehicle), and 'amortization' to the loss in value of an intangible asset (eg the purchase of a
licence or trademark). This loss over time is treated as a cost and written off (subtracted from
the profit) over several years.
3. What is push strategy?
Suggested answer: With a push strategy such as Manufacturing Resources Planning (MRP),
production is based on estimates of future demand, and begins according to the planned
production lead time. For example, warm jackets get pushed to clothing retailers as summer
ends and the fall and winter seasons start. Under a push system, companies have predictability
in their supply chains since they know what will come when – long before it actually arrives.
This also allows them to plan production to meet their needs and gives them time to prepare a
place to store the stock they receive.
4. What are the advantages of on-the-job training?
- individual tuition is given and it is in the workplace so the employee does not need to be
sent away (travel costs are expensive)
- it ensures there is some production from the worker while they are training
- it usually costs less than off-the-job training
- it is training tailored to the specific needs of the business.
5. Briefly explain a market nicher and provide some examples of market nicher.
Suggested answer: Market nicher refers to a marketing tactic deployed to target a specific
market segment which is unique. Niche market is often created by identifying what a customer
wants and this can be done if the company knows what the customer needs and then tries to
deliver a better solution to a problem which was not presented by other firms. A niche market
does not mean a small market, but it involves specific target audience with a specialized offering.
By doing so, the company becomes a market leader and it becomes possible for other firms to
enter that particular segment. For example, within the market for women’s shoes are many
different segments or niches. Shoes for vegan women would be a niche market, as would shoes
for plus-sized women or shoes for nurses.
6. What is product positioning? What does it mean?
Suggested answer: Product positioning is a form of marketing that presents the benefits of your
product to a particular target audience. Through market research and focus groups, marketers
can determine which audience to target based on favorable responses to the product. Product
positioning refers to the place that a product occupies in the minds of the customers and how it is
distinguished from the products of the competitors. In order to position products, companies may
emphasize the distinguishing features of their brand (what it is, what it does and how, etc.) or
they may try to create a suitable image (inexpensive or premium, utilitarian or luxurious, entry-
level or high-end, etc.) through the marketing mix. Once a product has achieved a strong
position, it can become difficult to reposition it. Positioning is one of the most powerful
marketing concepts.
7. Please differentiate accured expenses and prepaid expenses.
Suggested answer: An accrued expense is an accounting term that refers to an expense that is
recognized on the books before it has been paid. The expense is recorded in the accounting
period in which it is incurred. Since accrued expenses represent a company's obligation to
make future cash payments, they are shown on a company's balance sheet as current liabilities.
Accrued expenses are the opposite of prepaid expenses. Prepaid expenses are payments made in
advance for goods and services that are expected to be provided or used in the future. While
accrued expenses represent liabilities, prepaid expenses are recognized as assets on the
balance sheet. This is because the company is expected to receive future economic benefit from
the prepayment. On the other hand, an accrued expense is an event that has already occurred in
which cash has not been a factor. Not only has the company already received the benefit, it still
needs to remit payment. Therefore, it is literally the opposite of a prepayment; an accrual is the
recognition of something that has already happened in which cash is yet to be settled.
8. What is pull strategy?
Suggested answer: With a pull strategy, a company manufactures according to current demand,
which is satisfied from (a small) inventory. When pieces are removed from stock, replacements
are automatically ordered from suppliers. One example of an industry that operates under this
strategy is a direct computer seller that waits until it receives an order to actually build a
custom computer for the consumer.With a pull strategy, companies avoid the cost of carrying
inventory that may not sell. The risk is that they might not have enough inventory to meet
demand if they cannot ramp up production quickly enough.
9. What are the advantages of off-the-job training?
Suggested answer:
- a broad range of skills can be taught using these techniques
- if these courses are taught in the evening after work, they are cheaper for the business
because the employee will still carry out their normal duties during the day;
- the business will only need to pay for the course and it will not also lose the output of the
employee;
- employees may be taught a variety of skills, becoming multi-skilled, and this makes them
more versatile – they can be moved around the company when the need arises;
- it often uses expert trainers who have up-to-date knowledge of business practices.
10. Briefly explain a market leader and provide some examples of market leader.
Suggested answer: A market leader refers to a firm with the largest share or also with the
highest profitability margin in specific goods or service industry. A market leader has a
tendency of using its dominance to influence the direction which the market takes by winning
over customer loyalty, pricing, distribution coverage, profit, image, among others. A market
leader may be in the form of a brand, company or product. Maintaining a dominant market
share requires a company to not only retain its existing customers by building brand loyalty but
also attract new customers who may be unfamiliar with the product or service. The company
may also attract the customers of competitors by figuring out the ideal combination of quality
and price. In this modern age of the internet, it is easy to identify consumer-oriented market
leaders, such as Apple, Google, and Amazon. In capital goods, Boeing and Caterpillar are two
examples.
WRITING SAMPLES
Raising employees' income to the point where it can cover their most essential needs, which are
mostly physiological needs and security needs, is sometimes argued to be the optimal method to
motivate workers. However, due to the highly diverse living conditions and personal needs
among workers, the latter of which are entirely subjective, I'd argue that it is futile to come up
with one definite "best" way of motivating employees and that employers should take into
account their workers' level of income and his "higher" needs in order to derive his own
motivation method.
On the one hand, I concede that raising wages to allow workers afford basic necessities is
crucial to motivate workers in low income brackets who struggle to make ends meet. According
to Abraham Maslow, physiological needs—such as water, food and sleep—and security needs—
such as clothing and shelter—are lowest in his hierarchy of needs, which means that they must
be pursued and fulfilled first before considering other higher categories of needs. However,
while Maslow and Herzberg suggest, similarly, that such needs cannot motivate workers like the
ability to realize one's goals, the need for recognition and the sense of responsibility, I think that
for the working class, especially those who have low income and who have little needs for so-
called self-actualization, the fulfilment of the first two categories in Maslow's hierarchy of needs
is indeed the most effective motivator because for them, difficulties like having to carry out
menial tasks or being unable to make themselves widely recognized by employers become
superficial as long as they can feed their families.
However, increasing income to cover essential needs ceases to be the most effective way to
motivate employees once workers move up from lower income brackets to higher ones, or, in
other words, once they have been able to afford basic necessities and start to desire higher needs
in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, namely social, esteem and self-actualization needs. This hardly
needs explaining, because after all, nobody with high income would want to be paid just enough
to satisfy basic needs when such needs are so easily satisfied that they are readily taken for
granted. Instead, managers must seek other ways to keep such employees motivated, and this
matter, as I have mentioned before, depends highly on each worker's perspective on what is
counted as a "motivator", such as recognition, responsibility and promotion, according to
Frederick Herzberg. For those with a high enough income but have to perform boring tasks, job
rotation, enlargement and enrichment can be great ways to induce challenges; for those who
have to work under authoritarian managers, switching to a more democratic, or even a laissez-
faire management style might help increase employee's sense of responsibility; for others, good
job prospects can encourage them to work harder, and so on.
In conclusion, being paid only to be able to afford the bare minimum can only motivate people
with low wages, but it becomes a given once workers have a high enough income. In that case,
managers must identify the level of the hierarchy that their subordinates are pursuing in order to
come up with the optimal way to motivate their employees.
Various applauded ways of organizing companies have emerged in the length and breadth of the
development history of organizational structure. Nonetheless, among advocacy also exists
criticism regarding certain arrangement methods. In what follows, I shall analyze the benefits
and drawbacks of some prevalent forms of organizing companies before arriving at a personal
suggestion to alleviate those problems surrounding organizational structure.
To begin with, that large corporations could function properly in a single hierarchy is rather
rare. In most cases, the effective operation of large companies requires the involvement of a
more complex chain of command. The latest survey conducted by the University of Toronto has
pinpointed that the productivity rate of corporations employing a simple hierarchy is
considerably lower than that of companies resorting to an extended hierarchy. Such an example
has further consolidated the viewpoint that a complex hierarchy plays an indispensable role in
determining the outcome of an organization.
In terms of a common approach toward arranging the company structure namely the functional
structure, there remain some downsides to this organization’s system. One of the most
perceptible problems is the conflict of interest between departments with different visions and
objectives. To illustrate, while the marketing department aims at effective product promotion and
sales increase, the production department tends to focus on minimizing the production cost, and
the finance department pays attention to avoiding money problems as well as managing cash
flow efficiently. That being said, a strong market share might be the strategy of the marketing
department but it was against the principle of the finance one. In addition, a standard product
without optional features might be favored by the production department but not by the
marketing one. Thus, it could be seen that the implementation of the functional structure still
entails underlying demerits.
Apart from the functional structure, there are other methods of organizational arrangement.
Flattening hierarchies and delegating responsibility which encourages companies to reduce the
chain of command, take out layers of management and make the organization much flatter is an
example worth mentioning. Furthermore, the use of matrix management in which people report
to more than one superior has also proved to be substantially practical. Last but not least is the
formation of teams, or in other words, temporary groups that are responsible for an entire
project, and are split up as soon as it is successfully completed.
In conclusion, in parallel with the constant movement of the world, the structure of companies is
under no circumstances fixed. Hence, it is of paramount importance that those at the top of the
corporational pyramid make an all-embracing decision to orientate the organization in the most
rational direction.
As companies and organizations increase in their profits and importance, it is utmost important
for managers to consider a more novel and flexible managing method, namely Organizational
Structure, in order to effectively maintain business statuses. With this model of management,
problems and solution may arise, in which some will be addressed in this essay.
To start with, a typical business model practicing organizational structure would mean tasks are
to be divided and sorted for a variety of departments to resolve internally. The complexity of
these groups alone, along with the decentralization of power within forces would leave little
room for a hierarchical structure: while appointing the highest chief members wouldn't present
much difficulty, decision over each sector's prominence would prove to be near impossible. As
such, organizational structures are extensively utilized in larger firms, whereas smaller
businesses- with their power easier to be appointed- would prefer the chain-of-command
approach.
However, with organizational structures providing near-equal power throughout departments, it
is no surprise that conflicts of interests may arise. With each sector managing different aspects
of a firm, they may have varied priorities based from their positions. As an example, the
department of Marketing might want to boost advertisements in order to gain traction, only to be
met with dismissal from the Accounting sector, as expanding business could be risky.
An organizational approach could have the sense of mobility and cooperation as its advantage,
but that in turn could cause disagreements in needs as a drawback. As such, a different
approach, namely Matrix management, could be established. This method suggests the ability to
report and act accordingly to a specific section of a sector, such as ideas specifically for a
region. This bypasses the need for entire sectors to approve a decision, while maintaining the
core value of cooperation.
OrganizationalsStructure is simply one of many methods firms can utilize to manage their
company, and by combining it with ideas from other structures, its drawbacks can be lessened.
It is undeniable that enterprises are impossible to be organized in a single hierarchy. One of the
limits in this system may be standard conflicts of interest between departments with other
objectives. However, there are a variety of ways which assist companies in tackling these
problems.
Initially, organizing a large company in a single hierarchy is able to with numerous problems.
This is because no organization design or system of management is perfect. Traditionally,
organizations have a pyramidal structure, which establishes clear authority for work and
departments. In contrast, this method is a complicated chain of command which can slow down
decision-making, as well as create delays in communicating vertically through the management
levels and horizontally between teams. Additionally, due to having only a line manager – a far
distance between the top and the bottom, hierarchy organization can cause unequal treatment.
Therefore, because of the main reasons, most companies have other structures for alternative
measures such as: functional structure or matrix management in order to mitigate the
complication existing in a single hierarchy.
On the contrary, the other management methods also face to various problems. One of these may
be conflicts of interest between offices with their objectives. First of all, a conflict of interest in
business normally refers to a situation in which an individual's personal interests conflict with
the professional interests owed to their employer or the company in which they are invested.
Self- dealing can be considered as the most common type of conflicts, which occurs when a
management-level professional accepts a transaction from another organization that benefits the
manager and harms the company or the company's clients. Moreover, another common kind of
conflicts in business may be gift issuance. It happens when there is a gap between the rewards of
high promotions and those of the other career levels in each enterprise. Thus, they are two main
symbols of standard conflicts of interest between departments.
Furthermore, in order to overcome process management problems, a manager or director
should work closely with his or her employees. During the process, his or her is capable of
understanding their needs and taking steps to implement processes which allow them to work
efficiently as well as simply. Additionally, to restrict standard conflicts, employers had better
have an in-depth understanding of their staff’s qualities or interests. Not only that, but they also
pay more attention to teamwork, which can contribute to increase the relationship between
colleagues to achieve a common goal.
In conclusion, it is prevalent that a single hierarchy cannot helps corporations organize work
and department. However, when using other structure, they should focus on employees’ needs
and interests to decrease inequalities and conflicts between departments
