Functions, that led to success
Business entails people with a specific interest coming together to achieve their desired goals and come up with a business organization whose main purpose is to make a profit for the respective shareholders. Any business to gain a competitive advantage within the market must ensure that its goals and objectives are successfully met. A business organization can be formed for industrial, commercial, and merchandising purposes. Holiday Snack Limited is one of the successful businesses in the food and beverage industry.
It was formed in 1989 by a group known as the Bermudez majoring in the manufacturing of snacks like popcorns and the Caribbean crisp. Since its inception, the company has been successful in its operations all due to its four major functions which include procurement, productivity, distribution, and employee functions.
Procurement Function
For this company to run, it has majored in purchasing raw materials which are processed and turned into goods palatable and ready for consumption by the end-users. This is another uphill task altogether for resource management since its undertaking can either promote production and translate into comparatively enough profit or grievous losses.
Therefore, the tasked team must ensure that purchase of the raw materials is done exclusively on economic terms and conditions and then lastly used appropriately to thwart any spill out or wastage. This is best done by the management employing economic tools such as economic order quantity and inventory ratio turnover (Kakwezi and Nyeko, 2019).
This will help the company monitor holding inventory cost and shortage cost as well as sales generated from the inventory, respectively. This saves the company from overstocking which eventually translates into losses over time by minimizing stock sold and limiting the profit margin. The business organization also saves itself a lot from spending unnecessarily like paying the warehouse charges which in turn reduces profits.
Productivity Function
Production is the manufacturing of goods whose interval is dictated by the effectiveness of marketing and the rate at which the distributions are translated into revenues. This is majorly affected by the volume of the fixed asset the organization owns and the working capital. This prompts the production manager to employ economic tools such as capital employed turnover ratio to help them evaluate the revenue they are likely to realize from the existing capital. It will also help them ensure they are all effectively used since others having been used over time might not be useful in the long run.
Fixed asset turnover is another important tool for use in an organization that targets success in its endeavors. The tool helps the company calculate the time it is likely to take to translate its credit sales into liquid cash and boost the revenue stock. This directly affects production since the availability of inadequate cash impedes production by the organization’s purchasing power, especially for raw materials having been crippled. This also depends more on the organization’s investment in research and development spirit.
The market, in most cases, is marred with a stiff competition focusing more on the taste and preferences of the potential consumers. This necessitates the organization to beef up its investment in the same to boost its domineering in the market and steady its proceeds. An increase in demand will also always pile pressure on the company to increase its production correspondingly.
Distribution Function
The success of a business organization heavily depends on the inflow and outflow of cash. The company, having spent a lot on the acquisition of raw goods and production, needs, therefore, to distribute the goods at the required interval and revenues collected in due time. The cycle also requires to be maintained for the organization to keep alive (Cury et al., 2017).
Depending on the nature of the goods produced by Holiday Snacks limited the intermediaries in the chain of distribution must be limited to minimize holding of goods and prevent excess wastage or goods going bad. Therefore, it is ideal to combine wholesale, retail, and direct-to-consumer methods. Marketing is also vital to help emphasize the existence of the product in the mind of the prospective consumers by stating distinctly the advantage the snacks have over the correspondence from other organizations.
For instance, Holiday Snack limited did strip of food coloring and many spices, which were always being used to minimize the side effects which came and render good as natural and tastier as possible. Moreover, a criterion with cost-benefit must be sought while undertaking this to take care of reduction cost, minimize production cost and maximize the profit margin. Debtors’ turnover ratio must also be carefully taken care of to minimize bad debts, and delayed payments and maximize the average time taken by the organization in translating the credit sales into revenues and cash for the company.
Employees Function
Every business with an aim of success needs adequate personnel with a solid, goal-oriented mind and the ability to support the organization’s activities. All these focus on financial managers who must ensure an applicable wage structure. This will benefit the employees and the organization and promotional opportunities and appropriate incentives, motivate the employees to accelerate and improve their output (Hersona & Sidharta, 2017). This directly translates to more production and limited losses resulting from the negligence of workers who are demoralized and severely less motivated.
Employees’ function is an integral function of the business because the organization’s success in the market owes to its innovativeness and investment in research and development. Any organization depends on its employees’ successful involvement for it to thrive. This ensures it comes up with top-secret policies and advantages over the competitors and propels higher with more benefits and huge revenue turnouts (Hersona & Sidharta, 2017).
The Holiday Snacks limited organization perpetuity is at peril in any case the top-secret fundamental policies and strategies are leaked out to antagonist competitors (Holiday Snacks Ltd, 2021). They can use the information against the company and confound its magnificence in the market and economy at large.
Innovations of the company
An organization employing innovation and the application of innovative change within its functional core executes its operations differently compared to its competitors within the market. The rising need for change and growth has boosted various opportunities for businesses. A company that uses innovation on its products, for instance, aims at updating or developing the products until there is no similar product in the market. Also, an organization that deploys innovation in its production processes puts into economic use, its resources and time. This exposes such an organization to more competitive advantages as compared to other organizations that fail to embrace innovation.
A company can hardly stay afloat without or with little effort in investing in innovation and innovative moves. This is because innovation and innovative ideas give a company a strong base for production and reaching out to its consumers. Thus, this section focuses on discussing the concept of innovation and the application of innovative change at Holiday Snacks Limited. It also purposes to analyze how the organization has embraced innovation to help push its business growth.
With innovation, The Holiday Snacks Ltd. Has Differentiated Itself.
Holiday Snacks Limited has ensured that it enhances its business growth by staying at par with changes in trends and time. The leadership of the company has, over time, ensuring the application of criticality and creativity in the company transactions. This has helped the company in embracing innovative patterns in its business model. According to Purcell (2019), leaders have to be innovative as much as possible since it’s a core ingredient to successful production in a company. Leaders must, however, solidly come up with ways of going about the aspect of innovation as there is no particular or rigid way of coming up with new ideas.
Holiday Snacks Limited’s leadership has also ensured that the company is outstanding through the new innovative ideas they put in place each day to ensure that the company differentiates itself from the others. Differentiation has ensured that it does things in different trends in the competitive market domain. The youthful product consumers like associating themselves with market products that are cool and funky, and which tend to trigger the party spirit in its users.
The company is seen to be having a culture of producing such products, thus differentiating itself from other companies. (Holiday Snacks Ltd, 2021). Innovation is a key way of ensuring that a company uncommonly does things from others, to help in attracting more fortune and reputation from outside.
Innovation has Helped Maintain the Profitability of Holiday Snacks Ltd.
The market arena, alongside other aspects, is one dynamic field that keeps on changing and growing over time. There is a need, therefore, to keep a company business at utmost profitability and relevance.
Technology has, over time, proven to be a pushing factor in the pursuit of change and growth of organizations. For example, just in the last few years, 90% of the globe’s data has been created; Over 550 new web pages are developed each minute, and; by 2020, over 80 billion computing machines had connected to the worldwide web (Kemp, 2021). With such growth in innovative ideas and technological reforms, it would be unwise for Holiday Snacks Limited not to be at par with current technologies.
The innovation of the company, through its developed channels of communication, has been reaching out to clients. It prides itself in its ability to reach out to every single consumer of its products through its well-thought-out and convoluted distributed channels constructed and maintained over the years because of the dynamism in the market domain. With the large numbers of consumers reached out to, it is undoubtedly that the sales of the produced products have been stable, and some fortune is steadily being attained by the Holiday Snacks Ltd.
Innovation has led to the growth of Holiday Snacks Ltd
Growth in a company that is attributed to innovation tends to slow progress forward. Therefore, a business might opt to grow the business by acquiring others or merging, which is a speedy way of growth expensive. Therefore, innovation remains an ideal way of growth in the fields of production and marketing. The Boston Consulting Group surveyed the surveyed individuals; it was found that 79 % of the individuals purported that innovative moves ranked among the three best initiatives they employ in their business models (Ringel, 2020).
As employed by Holiday Snack Limited, the innovative moves have helped them in outstanding product and brand enhancement through creative branding methods. Innovation application of innovative change can therefore aid in the improvement and growth of a company.
Innovation Has Helped the Holiday Snacks Limited to Attract more Customers
The innovative inputs that the company has put in place have helped greatly in aspects like designing and branding and adding the customer taste to the products. Designs that are appealing to the eye, for example, the images of butter or chocolates on the candy wrappings, may help in attracting the younger children, thus growing the number of potential customers and buying audience. Thus, it is vital for any organization willing to grow to consider and embrace innovation and accept changes within its operations.
Innovative characteristics used
Holiday Snack Limited has been trying to offer the best services to its clients since its inception to be the best snack industry in the entire Caribbean region. To succeed in its vision, the organization must be innovative and come up with strategies that will ensure that they outdo its rivals so that clients will be consuming its products. Below are the key innovative characteristics used by Holiday Snack Limited to achieve its innovation.
Promoting and modeling risk-taking strategy
Any organization that intends to flourish must be ready to initiate risky projects. Holiday Snack Limited is an organization that has always endeavored to promote and model risk-oriented programs to favorably compete and outdo their business rivals to be a leading snack-producing industry. Taking risks in business has not always been what some people intend to do; however, any innovative environment must promote a risk-taking strategy (Yasini, 2016). The management of The Holiday Snack Limited is determined to model the risk-taking strategy which is appropriate to ensure that all operations flow smoothly for the company’s ultimate success.
The models of risk-taking at The Holiday Snack Limited started with the organization getting involved in social media platforms to advertise its products and services, which has improved the sales and popularity of the company. The organization, through management, has always been at the forefront, trying to achieve what other thriving companies have achieved (Shenggao, 2021). This is done by visiting companies for benchmarking and incorporating new ideas and leadership styles
Competitive Collaboration
To succeed, The Holiday Snack limited organization must embrace its rival’s way of conducting business. This is an important trait which t is ignored by many, but any organization which wants to succeed and does better than others should embrace it (Yasini, 2016).
To build a world-class and leading company, The Holiday Snack Limited has initiated ways of getting to know other companies on what they do to be successful. According to Couros (2021), an author on innovation in organizations, the characteristic of innovation in an industry requires a lot of transparency. While seeking information from other organizations, you should always try to give more details about your company.
Appreciating your current position as you aim for higher
The Holiday Snack Limited organization has always appreciated their efforts to improve the quality of the services which they render to their clients as they strive to make further improvements on their products and services. The organization has never felt that they have made it; each moment, they try to improve their services to enhance their satisfaction rates (Yasini, 2016).
While some companies have often mistaken innovation and technology, the two terms are not synonymous, and that is where companies miss the point. An organization can be equipped with modern technological advancements, but it may not be innovative.
Innovation involves having a different and better taste than what the rival organizations are doing. When an organization keeps doing things the traditional way, it will not be considered innovative; however, it might have the best technological facilities. It is to appreciate growth as an organization. However, it will make little sense to quit a job or get involved in any new innovative ideas because the company had previously invented something and is thriving.
Emphasize the spirit of sharing
Sharing is a characteristic trait that The Holiday Snack Limited organization has always embraced. Sharing includes but is not limited to; information through various social media handles, billboards, and print media. There is a need to circulate information to the potential client about the products and the kind of services that the organization provides (Yasini, 2016). The organization does not keep the ideas they have away from others; through sharing, the company may be criticized or applauded for whatever service or products they are presently offering or those they intend to provide.
Relationships
Innovative organizations which endeavor to be successful and be among the top-performing industries of their sector work on the relationship between the management and all the organization’s stakeholders. The Holiday Snack Limited organization is no exception when it comes to this trait of an innovative organization. When an organization tends to thrive and be creative, there must be a good relationship between the management and the subjects (Yasini, 2016). A strained relationship can dent the entire process of a company’s desire to be innovative as each stakeholder is required to have an input in the process of innovation.
Organizations that are already established have always been thought not able to innovate. This is a notion that results because the companies are considered rigid and rely on traditional operating methods. However, leaders can create some conditions that can favor innovation in a company. Irrespective of the team in place or the nature of the organization, with exemplary leadership, innovation will thrive. One strategy to set the spirit of the invention in industries is to maintain the level of energy deployed at work from the start all through to the end.
Providing the minimum required resources can be an excellent strategy to enhance innovation; when equipped with many materials, employees tend to produce the best results. Finally, in a bid to promote innovation, the managers can encourage team members to work more on experimentation; by so doing, employees will find ways of solving problems encountered in their way.
Potential causes of failure of innovative activities
Innovation in the field of business entails creating new ideas and harnessing them appropriately to establish new goods and services with a unique and distinct taste. The business environment is ever-growing competitively hence making innovation a necessity and a priority to organizations to help them maintain their relevance in the market and ensure steady profit turnout (Pallegrino et al., 2017).
However, with innovation standing as a lucrative tool and a fundamental business function for almost all organizations, it has never been a ride on roses, especially for Holiday Snack limited organization. Thus, it is critical to look at some of the potential challenges that have proved malignant to this organization hence hindering its innovative process. Some of these challenges include;
Organization related factors
This organization has cultivated a norm of flexibility and readiness to change that comes by, which has often put it at par in the inception of fresh ideas and undertakings. Also, Holiday Snacks limited, having undertaken several innovations such as adapting to the exclusion of the use of spices and adopting the use of natural additives, has laid the foundation for automatic adaption to increasing demand for innovation since there is a blueprint of existing experience (Soltani et al., 2018).
This has also helped minimize possible internal resistance to innovation by the research and innovation team in the organization, making them ever ready to burn more energy and intellect for more research.
Despite the success, some of the strategies that the organization has deployed are not rewarding. The firm has continuously majored in research to help figure out new potential markets and cultivate necessary new skills to acquire more customers. For example, the firm identified a diabetic population that doesn’t need sugar added to their snack. This has not been successful since other competitive firms tap this before long and make it an opportunity to overtake the company within the market.
Project friendliness
Several new ideas have always been incepted and translated into projects with some appearing lucrative for producing and distributing goods. Even so, they have always failed to witness their first birthday shortly after launching; they have proved to be expensive to an extent the firm cannot continue running them effectively. Moreover, the management style employed for innovation has always dragged or promoted the success of the newly initiated projects.
Many projects demand a step-by-step rollout and organization into phases, an undertaking that impedes the success of the projects initiated and it’s only realized during evaluation. Price, quality, and market access of the products have also promoted innovation where the prices are economic friendly and the quality is not questionable. There has always been a mismatch in this piling devastation on the innovation team.
Goods related factors
The major issues with the product have always been the quality of goods. Due to the competitiveness of the market, antagonist firms have been putting more effort into improving their goods, an act that has always put Holiday Snacks limited in a wake-up mode ever since. Matching this has never been easy since it has always called for the firm to deep more into finance reserve to maintain relevance.
Quality of products has not been able to attain customer satisfaction due to taste being a variable with many at the individual level. This mixed reaction has made it difficult for the firm to attain focus since it has to satisfy conflicting tastes in the market. Eventually, in many cases, the organization has always incurred losses in place of expected profits. This is because they do not easily know what to supply in a specific place.
Nature of the market
In many cases, the Holiday Snacks limited organization has spent a lot in improving the quality of goods to meet customers’ demands. The research and development team has been determined to meet the conditions. The challenge has always been accessing the market owing to the nature of the market. The market has always been scattered and not concentrated, prompting the organization to invest more in marketing to reach the potential end-user (Pellegrino and Savona, 2017). The logistic chain management for delivering these goods, especially in a scattered market, necessitates more investment. However, in most cases, this is not economically friendly to the organization.
Distribution type has also posed a huge challenge since wholesalers have been stocking a huge number of products. In some cases, the rate of accessing these products has been slow since not many potential consumers appreciate walking into the wholesalers to purchase these products. This has always resulted in low revenue and profit turnover since there is a low sales ratio. All this has limited the organization’s innovation and impeded its growth and development.
Reference List
Cury, J. Touchon, M. and Rocha, E.P. (2017) ‘Integrative and conjugative elements and their hosts: composition, distribution and organization’, Nucleic acids research, 45(15), pp.8943-8956. Web.
Couros, G. (2021) ‘5 Characteristics of an Innovative Organization’. Weblog.
Hersona, S. and Sidharta, I. (2017) ‘Influence of leadership function, motivation and work discipline on employees’ performance’, Journal of Applied Management, 15(3), pp. 528-537. Web.
Holiday Snacks Ltd. (2021) Holiday Sn acks Ltd – Snack Food Manufacturers in Charlieville. Web.
Kakwezi, P. and Nyeko, S. (2019) ‘Procurement processes and performance: Efficiency and effectiveness of the procurement function’, International Journal of Social Sciences Management and Entrepreneurship (IJSSME), 3(1). pp. 172-182.
Kemp, S. (2021) Digital 2021: Global Overview Report, DataReportal – Global Digital Insights. Web.
Pellegrino, G. and Savona, M. (2017) ‘No money, no honey? Financial versus knowledge and demand constraints on innovation’, Research Policy, 46(2), pp.510-521. Web.
Purcell, W. (2021) ‘The Importance of Innovation in Business’. Weblog.
Ringel, M. (2020) Innovation in 2015. Web.
Shenggao, Y., 2021. Holiday dough snacks a unique gem in province. Web.
Soltani, Z. Zareie, B., Milani, F.S. and Navimipour, N.J. (2018) ‘The impact of the customer relationship management on the organization performance’, The Journal of High Technology Management Research, 29(2), pp.237-246. Web.
Yasini, P. (2016) ‘Specific characteristics of innovation management process’, International Journal of Organizational Leadership, 5, pp.162-171. Web.