Thursday, June 14, 2012

Role of Human Resources Planning in Optimization of Organization Supply Chain System


Supply chain can be interpreted as " a series of co ordinates effort and managing the inter-linkages of the various processes in the organization in order to executing the complete cycle of receiving an order up the the delivery of the order in the most cost effective manner".

This meant that the processes such a processing a new order received from a customer, to ensuring sufficient material are placed with suppliers to producing the order and deliver to the logistics for delivering to the customers.

It sound logical and simple enough to understand this concept as even before the term supply chain was coined up in the 1980s, this has been the way businesses are run throughout the whole world. However with the increase of competition among organizations and directly even between countries, the drive to ensure that the supply chain system serve the organization to drive it to further excellent.

This been said, the driving force to ensure organizations achieved it goal of increasing business and receive the rewards of increasing sales and profitability is the people.

When we discuss "people", we actually discussing about (a) right level of people to handle the tasks (b) right type of candidates to fill the job (c) right type of skills

I will called this the 3R.

There is no strategy which will work to ensure that you will win in a battle field when you may have all the weaponry in your amour but no soldiers or CORRECT TYPE OF SOLDIERS to operate the system.

RIGHT LEVEL OF PEOPLE

What this mean is that, if an organization is to function well, the organization has to be supported by its most important asset, i.e. the employees. Organization which take a hard look at the process of hiring and retaining it "non appreciative" asset will improve on it ability to attract the correct number of employees and this will keep ensure them to succeed in the longer run.

In many part of the world, we can see that organizations will "chop and slice" the number of employees once sales are negatively affected and profit drop. Sadly the choice is too simple to made when a company start to lose it shares and having a high cost of manpower.

However, this in itself reflecting the human resources planning in the first instance. How organization planned their resources and how a company view the potential of the businesses play an important aspect. Poor forecasting and poor execution of the strategic plan will eventually affect the manpower to sales ratio and taking middle ground view between some conservative and liberal view will be preferred.

Increasing employees efficiency instead of hiring will and should be the first option before any recruitment take place only for the risk of terminating these employees later.

However on the extreme side, there are organizations which failed to forecast well and took an extremely conservative view.

Many organizations are willing to pay overtime cost and additional delays to customers instead of ensuring the orders and total operation are run smoothly with the right number of staffing.

Overtime cost to the cost of production should not be more then 5% of total additional wages paid and in the long run anything more then this will mean the cost of the organization could be a :"runaway affect". I.e. escalating cost run up.

This meant that in the end of the day, the cost of overtime will be a "killer" to the organization and eat into profit and run up cost.

Right level of people is the total number of employees needed versus the sales forecasted and with people, it embodied the supply chain concept more effectively, i.e. the battle can be fought at a correct level.


RIGHT TYPE OF CANDIDATE (EMPLOYEES)

This has to be a serious consideration as well.

Type of employees hired, most importantly is not to make up the correct level of numbers and head count.

When Human Resources Department are pressurized to get the number up, the most common mistakes is to hired employees which will made up the numbers and ignoring the candidate profile.

For a company to successful, the right type of people hired will be extremely important. The key is the ATTITUDES AND APTITUDES OF THE PEOPLE YOU HAVE.

Positive attitudes will bring oiled the company manpower engine smoothly just like a new car and aptitudes will come handy with the correct attitudes.

Without having a right resources, an organization will always and normally run into road blocks. Human being are sometimes like an animal in the jungle. I.e. been territorial based and territorial based attitudes although is necessary to function correctly each employees own scope, but this can also bring disaster if there need to be a functional or system changes in the organization in order to improve things.

RIGHT TYPE OF SKILLS


Employing the right experience and skill level is important but not as important at having the right type of employees.

Hiring employees with the correct skills and experience bring advantage to the organization especially in the top level decision and strategic type of position. You may able to move faster a head but a organization which can think differently and outside the box and hire personnel in different industry may also be highly rewarded as well.

By been different and not stick to stereotype, Human Resources recruitment policy can bring better
rewards. Other experience from other industry may and will able to complement the industry you are in.

Human resource role in ensuring long term key success to an organization supply chain improvement and stability need to be reviewed constantly and with it, any system to be in placed will only then worked properly like an oiled engine tune to run a long, long marathon......

2 comments:

Unknown said...

This was really good. We had heard this before, but it was nice to see it in writing. We are thinking of doing an HR webinar to help some of our new employees. We like making sure we are being as productive and positive as we can at work. Tips like this will get us where we want to be.

http://www.hrlearningcenter.com/webinars.aspx

Sang Hong said...

The reality on the ground is that HR practitioners most of the time are under tremendous pressure to fill vacant due to staff turnover of expansion program and the short term plan was always the easiest but the most difficult to sustain.

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