Output diagnosis for Palm Inc.

Essay Instructions:

Please use headings and subheadings to make the paper easy to read and follow. The company to use is Palm Inc. A copy of the input diagnosis is included as an additional file Expectations: First you need to identify the outputs of the organization at each of three levels. Also identify the goals that it has set and its current performance. Include the following: * Outputs at the organizational level are the products and/or services that it provides to its customers. What are these and how does the company categorize them? How does it measure its organizational perfomance (e.g., sales, net profit, return on sales, return on assets, market share, customer satisfaction, etc.) Provide some specific performance data. * What are some ways the company identifies groups? For example, are there geographic groups (or divisions), functional groups, etc. What are the outputs of these groups? How does it (or how might it) measure performance of these groups? * What are some of the key individual functions, and what are their outputs? How do these outputs contribute to the group outputs? How do they measure individual performance? * Evaluate how the outputs at the different levels interact with each other. Determine if you think the congruence of the outputs is high, medium, or low. Then Make a strong Case. It is very important that you support your position with evidence and information that you have discussed earlier in the report.

Essay Sample Content Preview:

Title: Output diagnosis for Palm Inc.
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Palm inc. was established in 1992 as a commercial unit focused on mobile computing. Palm Inc. provides a range of products and services to the global consumer market, business people and professionals. These products include; Palm handheld computers, Palm Pre™, Treo™ and Centro™ smartphones. Palm Inc. also provides services and accessories to their customers. Smartphones and handheld computers are the company’s two product lines. Palm Inc. makes use of select retail, reseller, Internet, and wireless avenues to sell her products (Palm, 2010). This paper will apply the Nadler and Tushman (input-output) model to assess the performance of Palm Inc and therefore analyze the company’s level of output congruence.
Palm Inc., goals and profile overview:
The major goal of Palm Inc is to become a leading global mobile device company. The company aims at increasing their market share of the fast growing smartphone market. To achieve this, Palm pursues a number of strategic objectives including the following: Product differentiation aimed at providing exciting user experience through appealing product mix (of hardware, software and services) and design; availing a webOS ecosystem that will promote diversity for the users; enhancing innovation and intuition in mobile devices; and applying a sustainable dynamic outsourced business form (Porter, 1980).
Palm Inc designs and develops their products in collaboration with their internal engineering, marketing and supply chain organizations. Palm Inc focuses their design efforts towards improvement of the existing products alongside developing new ones. Palm Inc deploys a customer-focused strategy in designing their products so as to provide customers with innovative products which meets customer needs of ease of use, simplicity, mobility, fashion and functionality (Montgomery, 1995).
Regarding the required technology to be applied to support product development, Palm may either license from third parties or generate internally. The product concept is initiated and endorsed first before being handed over to the company’s internal engineers and user interface design specialists for execution. The execution is such that the company’s multi-disciplinary teams are engaged in finalizing the product design and passing it over to manufacturing. Palm therefore does product definition then passes the manufacturing process to the outsourced units.
A limited number of manufacturers are involved in hardware manufacturing. Ordinarily, hardware is Palm’s most visible product element. However, Palm undertakes value addition and product differentiation mainly through software development and also through software-hardware integration. These processes of software development helps Palm achieve its objective of ensuring an enhanced and extended software platform alongside providing application software functionality that is well innovated and integrated. Palm Inc has based most of its research and development in Sunnyvale, California where the Headquarter is located (Palm, 2010).
Palm Inc has outsourced partners from Taiwan and China mainly to manufacture a greater part of the company’s Palm Pre, Centro, and Treo together with other assembled products. Palm outsources services for volume manufacturing and for building the Palm-designed prototypes. Apart from that, Palm Inc also does global distribution outsourcing in Hong Kong, Illinois US, and Ireland. Palm’s manufacturing partners often directly ship products to the company’s wireless carrier clients’ distribution centers. Even the parts which Palm designs into their products are outsourced from a range of suppliers. Most of the vital parts for the company are readily available from many sources except for some specific few including certain discrete components, radio frequency components, cameras, and power management integrated circuits which can only be obtained from one source or from a limited number of sources (Bradley, 2010).
Palm’s Performance Assessment criteria
To estimate and analyze their general business performance, Palm makes use of both the Generally Accepted Accounting Procedures (GAAP) and non-GAAP measures. This then guides the company in arriving at operation decisions, in forecasting, and in planning for future production cycles. To Palm, it is more appropriate to use non-GAAP monetary measures to ascertain the company’s financial status in the current period, ongoing operations (work in progress), and the company’s future prospects.
The ongoing operations consist of ongoing trading revenues and expenses but do not include certain cost elements which the company does not anticipate to recur every quarter. Palm Inc applies non-GAAP measures only as an alternative approach to enhance the understanding of their financial performance but does not either substitute the GAAP results or produce results deemed superior to those deduced using the GAAP mea...

Updated on January 26, 2024

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