Saturday, July 31, 2010

PC SHOW

Overwhelming response from the PC Show 2010 @ Suntec Convention Center!














Friday, July 30, 2010

WEEK 16 (03.AUG.2010) - PROJECT LIFE CYCLE - Project tracking and control

16 weeks of lessons simply flew pass without us realizing it. We are now already at the end of the semester. Joyous moment that we had throughout this semester will always be a memory to all of us. Project management course that we initially thought were so hard, difficult and tough, yet we have successfully gone through every single challenge of it smoothly.

But hang on.......we have yet to reach the climax, although we are almost there, but still there is one more gigantic challenge that we need to face....PRESENTATION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

For this week, it is time to hand over our hardship work to our dearest lecturer Mr Yap. So, here we summarize our project assignment that we have done up till today. Here our project done by our team members, Boo Wei Chong, Suhana, Ruth and Regina :)

PROJECT CLOSURE REPORT

PROJECT NAME: Annual Warehouse Sale
DEPARTMENT: Project & Marketing Department
FOCUS AREA: To generate sales and eliminate products that are obsolete.
PRODUCT/PROCESS: Electronic Goods

Project Closure Report Purpose
Annual Warehouse Sale for HP has been successfully planned and implemented. The objectives of the project are met.
This project generates a profit of SGD $95K from selling of existing electronic goods that are no longer marketable. The surplus products are sold to generate revenue instead of being dispose at a cost.
This Project Closure Report is created to accomplish the following goals:
•Review and validate the success of the project.
•Confirm outstanding issues, risks and recommendations.
•Outline tasks and activities required to close the project.
•Identify project highlights and best practices for future projects.

Project Closure Report Goals
This Project Closure Report is created to accomplish the following goals:
•Significant reduction in product being obsolete/dead stocks.
•Successfully create product and brand awareness with the help of marketing efforts and media publicity.

Project Background Overview
•Streamline inventory management and reduce fixed costs.
•Improved visibility of supply chain inventories and actual consumption rates to help ensure production level closely match demand.
•Reduce operating cost, by optimizing the inventory level and reduce storage cost for stock on hand.
•Reduce errors, fulfillment cost and lead-time.
•Enhance controls and replenish stock to retailer from the return of low-end products or products near expiry date.

Project Highlights and Best Practices
Project Highlights:
•Increase inventory turnover.
•Increase revenue.
•Eliminate wasted travel time and cost to dispose obsolete product.
Best Practices:
•Early anticipation of any technical issues (eg Machines breakdown / malfunction during AWS) and possible solutions put in place prior to its happenings.

Project Closure Synopsis
Prepare a handover report that identifies all variations to the original contract and seeks acknowledgment as follow:
•all project objectives and deliverables have been met and accepted, terms and conditions for parties concerned.
•win-win solution for both consumer and company.
•all deliverables have been delivered .
•all training has been completed.
•the product or service has been fully tested and are in operational condition during the Annual Warehouse Sale event.
•all appropriate documentation has been provided the service support arrangements are in place.

Goals and Objectives Performance
•Duration of project completion was on schedule base on the event dates, project completed within 48 days, with a buffer of 2 days.
•Initial cost objective was SGD$85,000 and actual cost was SGD$ 78,096.

Success Criteria Performance
•Reduced surplus inventory due to be obsolete.
•Maintain real-time information with retailer carrying the products loyalty.
•Improved production scheduling and capacity utilization of warehouse space.
•Streamlines inventory management, reduces fixed cost.
•Provides a positive impact on productivity and information flow.

Budget Performance
Project Budget Overview:
• This project involves no investment cost
• Targeted costs was estimated at SGD$78,096
• Project was successfully carried out below targeted cost.
SGD
BENEFIT $173,520.00
COSTS $78,096.00

Formula Calculations
ROI = Benefits - Costs: 95,424.00
ROI = Benefits-Costs/Cost : 1.22 = 122%

Project Budget Actions:
•The main budget were allocated to the rental of venue, Sales & Marketing, printed material as well as the transportation of products.
•Manpower cost reduced drastically with allocation of internal staff employ for the Annual Warehouse Sale.

Metrics Performance Recommendations
•To negotiate for even lower rental / contractor set-up costs for future Annual Warehouse Sale venues.
•Negotiate & secure better instalments plans from banks prior to AWS.
•Manpower cost budgeted for SGD$ 9500 for IT, assembling and customer support.

Resource Management
Resource issues:
•The venue locations and staff personnel resulted in the major contribution to cost.
Resource solutions:
•To hire internal staff as part of the Annual Warehouse Sale event for important job functions.
•Consider hiring students, homemaker and retirees for jobs to handle customer enquiry and leaflets distribution.

Issue Management
Issues:
•The event dates are fixed and we have to work closely with the contractor to set-up the venue on time and within schedule.

Issues managed:
•Contractor is given a timeframe to ensure job completed as per schedule.

Risk Management
Project Risks :
•Pilferage and products loss will be a main concern.

Quality Management
•Storage location for products was selected to ensure a secured and surveillance available at all time.

Communication Management
•The Annual Warehouse Sale was carried as planned and within budget.
•Negotiation was successful as all parties’ established good relation and win-win solution.

Customer Expectation Management
•Customer requirements for a secured, convenient and accessible venue location were met.

Asset Management
•Work closely with warehouse operation and freight forwarder to manage the product to be transported to the events venue.
•Co-ordinate with Human Resource on the manpower needed for the Annual Warehouse Sale.

Lessons Learned
•The concepts of having an annual warehouse sale worked well and it was proven to save cost by generating revenue for the company and minimizing manpower resources.
•The products are made available to consumer to purchase at a fraction of cost thereby able to reduce inventory on hand and result in a market share gain.
•Communication management is an important factor which helps to clinch important deals for future advancements of the company.

Postproject Tasks

•To explore and implement project to various business unit and divisions within the company that could benefit from this event.
•Further enhancement and improvements could be implemented to facilitate our inventory control.

Project Closure Recommendations
Main recommendation would be to gain project closure approval from the stakeholders and management who have been kind in their support and understanding of our project. With this, we hope to obtain their agreement and commitment in the project to be fulfill yearly, bottom line to generate additional revenue for the company.

Reflection: Coming to an end of the coursework, we were able to visualise the actual workload of doing project management for our event, Annual Warehouse Sale. The stages that we went through to arrive at where we are currently has been a long journey. The life cycle of the project has came to the final stage.

A recap of our project snapshot : While working on this project conflict arose, and we had to overcome these conflicts as we had learned in one of the activity. Additionally, communication is also a key to a successful team. Believe through the learning process, we have emerge as a knowledgable person in project management and able to relate it back to our current work situation. The closing of the project has provided us a summary of what we had work on and to provide to the stakeholder and management a comprehensive view of our project, the Annual Warehouse Sale.

Sunday, July 18, 2010

WEEK 15 (27.JULY.2010) - PROJECT LIFE CYCLE - COMMUNICATION & CONFLICT




Today, we are shown few videos by our lecturer for our better understanding on the topic that we learnt today...COMMUNICATION & CONFLICT.




We did a group discussion in a class on the effective communication, anger management and conflict handling. We did a presentation and teacher shot us with challenging questions to our answers. But our group leader was witty and quick enought to convince teacher and justify our answers. However the point raised by teacher were valid, and we took back into consideration if we faced the same challenges in our work situation we may know how to handle them.

Our tutorial 5 was thrown back to us because we made some error on our risk assessment portion. Teacher suggested that those cost that are deemed necessary to be incurred must be included in our cost budgeting. So we have taken back into consideration that we will amend our cost budgeting and which will intern affect our ROI calculation.
Hopefully it will be right this time.... :)

Task for next week will be to re-submit tutorial 5, and we will be finally come to the end of the project management assignment. We are required to submit the full report of all the weekly tutorial that we have and prepare project closure.
For now..we are all lost..... :( .. but we will do our best!!!!

Reflection: Every project will have communication breakdown at some point of the stage. Through this activity, we are able to learn better as with proper communication we are able to understand each other needs and objective in getting the project done on schedule and by the given timeline. This tutorial on which we are assigned - to work on the budget had us thinking as we have to look at each job activity to forecast and anticipate the actual cost involve. We brainstorm, analyse and re-calculate the actual cost for each job funtion to ensure that it is justifiable and accurate as per what its expected in the current work environment. Fortunately, we are able to derive a solution and understand the flow of the working calculation.

WEEK 14 (20.JULY.2010) - PROJECT LIFE CYCLE

This week we are discussing about how to work on our Tutorial 5. For this tutorial we are required to do a risk assessment on our project. As what we have learnt in week 11, risk management, we are to discuss and do a brainstorm on the risk severity, probability and ranking those risks which we have derived from our WBS activity. Thereafter, we will be discussing on the impact, contigency plan and contigency cost of the risks.



Time for brainstorming gang!!!!!

Reflection: The project itself turned out to be a great learning experience for every member of my team, including myself. From our project, we are able to learn the risk analysis of running up to conceptionalisation of doing a mega project such as Annual Warehouse Sale (AWS). Of course, there are many risk involve in doing any project of this largescale. Therefore, we have to base on the fact and data gather to make an informed decision on the risk management affecting our project. We will analyse on the top ten risk applicable and later narrow down to the top two. This way we able to foresee what are the most prominent issue on hand and how to go about getting the risk identified and to reduce the impact to the project where cost are involve, which will in turn affect company bottomline.


WEEK 13 (13.JULY.2010) - PROJECT LIFE CYCLE - SWOT ANALYSIS

A strength could be:
  • Your specialist marketing expertise.
  • A new, innovative product or service.
  • Location of your business.
  • Quality processes and procedures.
  • Any other aspect of your business that adds value to your product or service.

A weakness could be:

  • Lack of marketing expertise.
  • Undifferentiated products or services (i.e. in relation to your competitors).
  • Location of your business.
  • Poor quality goods or services.
  • Damaged reputation.

An opportunity could be:

  • A developing market such as the Internet.
  • Mergers, joint ventures or strategic alliances.
  • Moving into new market segments that offer improved profits.
  • A new international market.
  • A market vacated by an ineffective competitor.

A threat could be:

  • A new competitor in your home market.
  • Price wars with competitors.
  • A competitor has a new, innovative product or service.
  • Competitors have superior access to channels of distribution.
  • Taxation is introduced on your product or service.
http://www.marketingteacher.com/lesson-store/lesson-swot.html


Task for this week - comlepletion and submission of Tutorial 4.
For tutorial 4, we are expected to perform a network analysis (AON) with a stated assumption. Using the derived WBS, we have to use microsoft project to create a schedule.



Based on the scheduling calculation of the WBS, the timeline schedule for our project will be in total of 50days (includes 2days float). Here attached is the network schedule of our project timeline.


Reflections :

During this class, we did a class activity using the SWOT analysis. Most of us do not use SWOT analysis in our normal course of work and we had to think hard... but once we understand how useful SWOT is, we were all very happy and some of us even starting thinking of its application in our course of work ! This is very exciting as we can now propose this tool to our bosses to improve our job areas/scope.