Team Management Activity: Operational and Strategic Planning
Here is the scenario and situation:
Assume you are an employee working in the Amazon warehouse, and you pack orders and categorize them into small, medium, and large batches. You are considered a packer. You have experience packing all sizes and have been with the organization for two years. You are considered one of their best employees, you have a solid reputation for being a hard worker, and all of your orders are packed correctly. You have also been busy; you recently completed Amazon’s management training program, and you have completed your BABA degree at the Forbes School of Business and Technology at the University of the Arizona Global Campus.
Congratulations: You have just been promoted to manager. You will be relocated to a new plant that is two hours away that employs 100 employees. You will oversee a team of 10 supervisors and 90 packers and will now oversee the entire warehouse operation. How will you work to use and apply the five functions of management?
Now let’s apply the five functions. In your paper, include the following sections:
Planning: Examine the specific areas you will choose to manage that fall under the planning function.
For example, what might be some of the things you will plan to do and implement to build an effective team and culture? People are the most important resource in any business, what do you plan to do to build a positive team culture? What processes and systems do you plan to use?
Organizing: Assess if the present structure that Amazon has set up is working.
Do you need to make or suggest any changes to make it more efficient and effective? What structure will you use and implement? Explain how you will use departmentalization in your organizational structure.
Staffing: Analyze your staffing needs.
How do you intend to staff your organization and replace members that leave or are promoted? How does the HR process apply? What things (if any) will you suggest?
Leading: Justify the leadership theory and style you will follow to ensure efficiency.
Will you use transformational or transactional leadership? Why or why not?
Controls: Identify what controls and measures you will implement.
How will you apply the four steps of control (these are in Chapter 7; i.e., establishing standards, measuring performance, comparing performance, and making decisions)?
Team Management Activity: Operational and Strategic Planning
An operational plan utilizes a specific and comprehensive plan that guides the whole team to achieve its objectives. The first consideration is outlining the employees' daily tasks to allow a free-flow of work, which the department manager does. Each employee is given a particular task that must be accomplished daily, weekly, or monthly. In other words, the manager creates a timeline for the department. Another factor that needs to be considered is the operational budget contracted from the annual departmental budget (Alternative Board, 2020).
To ensure the operational plan's success, the superior positions must formulate the strategic plan first (Alternative Board, 2020). In contrast to the operational plan that is only concerned with the fiscal year's goals, the strategic plan creates its mission and vision and formulates the long-term goals. The strategic plan's financial budget is also based on the strategic budget that considers its overall projects (Foley, n.d.).
System Focus: Supply Chain Management
In the case study, the manager oversees the whole warehouse. Under this, he also manages a team of 10 supervisors and 90 packers. All of them play an essential part in the supply chain management since Amazon is a well-known e-commerce and retail company, which delivers products and services to consumers in the least possible time (Charles, n.d.).
Supply chain management follows the direction of the products and services. In this case, the middle management monitors the processes. The manager efforts to properly link the production, shipment, and distribution of the products. Therefore, he needs to realize the importance of control, errorless inventories, and efficient production and distribution and guide his subordinates to prevent mistakes by creating a centralized system (Charles, n.d.).
Building Effective Team and Culture
Human resource is the most significant factors to be considered in the supply management chain. The warehouse employees shall process all the products until they can be appropriately distributed and correctly to the recipients. Their roles are significant in handling perishable and fragile products that need fast delivery. Thus, it is essential to take care of the staff by improving their competitiveness through on-the-job training and coaching, providing them sufficient support and benefits, and preventing possible harm by creating a positive team culture (Moneey, 2019).
To do these, the warehouse manager must be transparent in all activities and to all the stakeholders, including the employees, the suppliers, and the consumers. Transparency is necessary from outsourcing down to logistics because it is essential in monitoring the costs and attaining the stakeholders' anticipations. This leads to trust formation within the team and with the suppliers (SpenDifference, 2019).
Next, the risk assessment shall be done to prevent blaming the employees (i.e., supervisors) when the target number of goods packed or the timeline has not been met. Time is a vulnerable aspect at the warehouse because the increase in demand (i.e., number of products to be packed) might not match the workers' capacity. When this happens, a contingency plan must ensue to prevent blaming the manager's subordinates. To do this, proper risk assessment shall be done, and the following questions must be answered: 1) Where in the supply chain will there possibly a problem? 2) How can we lessen the chances of delaying the delivery when this happens? To answer these, the manager must fully understand the capability of the suppliers and the human resources. Their strengths and weaknesses must be assessed to allow for a better sourcing arrangement and diminish disruptions in the flow (SpenDifference, 2019).
Third, open communication is essential to understand the said strength and weaknesses. The manager must maintain an open mind to allow for two-way communication and address the workforce's difficulties. The manager must also remain unbiased to gain the trust of his subordinates (SpenDifference, 2019).
Organizing
Amazon, lead by Jeffrey Bezos, its CEO, follows a functional organizational structure, which emphasizes departmental functions as the basis for interaction. Amazon's corporate structure is divided into global function-based groups, global hierarchy, and geographic divisions.
The global function-based groups are the most potent teams in Amazon. It is composed of teams and a senior manager who shall facilitate effective e-commerce operations management throughout Amazon. Jeffrey Bezos, the CEO, heads this division, and it has the following departments: business development, amazon web services, finance, accounting, international consumer business, legal and secretariat, and consumer business.
Next, the global hierarchy utilizes the classical structure, where there is a vertical line of command. The superiors provided authorization and decisions that shall guide the e-commerce firm. Various senior managers per department shall employ Amazon's directives. The company benefits from the managerial aspect of this strategy (Meyer, 2019).
Lastly, Amazon is divided into geographical areas, such as North America and International. This considers the economic aspects of the geographical location and adjusts the decisions based on the assessments. It enables the company to address the diversity in markets per geographical region (Meyer, 2019).
In the case presented the newly assigned manager at the warehouse in one particular geographical division. The current structure of Amazon adjusts the needs based on the particular region's demands and economic status. Therefore, the warehouse only caters to one region, probably in one location. This ensures efficiency and prevents overproduction and underproduction of products. The current organizational structure is also suitable for improving regional and international growth by effectively supporting the online retail market challenges in particular regions. However, one of its disadvantages is that it is inflexible, which increases the time before the superiors can respond to a problem in one region. Like that of the warehouse in the case study, the local and regional offices do not have adequate autonomy. Therefore, the dominance of the global function-based groups and global hierarchy must be reduced and allow for more flexibility by providing more autonomy to the lower-level hierarchies (Meyer, 2019).
In this case, funct...