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ORGANISATION
DEVELOPMENT
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With fierce
competition on a radically different global marketplace, we need powerful
competitive capability. The
organisation must become Agileby
deliveringsubstantially higher customervalue
at a fraction of theprevioustime
and costs. Incidentally, Agility was founded at Lehigh University Agility
Forum funded largely by the US Federal Government in order to lead American
corporations to sustain global competitiveness during the recession in
the late 80's.MAFF is founded by Dr. Yan-Goh Ng with the vision of providing
the Agility knowledge base for the Malaysian enterprises to be globally
competitive. Cheap labour is no longer the criterion for the MNC's to set
up production facilities in Malaysia nor the basis for the local manufacturers
to be competitive globally. What is needed is the critical resource, people,
who are knowledgeable and Agile. It is about leading and managing the human
resources to provide the products and services which are able to give total
customer satisfaction in a rapidly changing and volatile marketplace.Advanced
organisations in the US are not alone in their pursuit of Agility as the
strategy for the future. In Europe, it is being pursued as the Fractal
Enterprise, inspired by Professor Hans-Jurgen Warnecke's book, The Fractal
Company: A Revolution in Corporate Vulture. In Japan, it has been driven
for some time by the benchmark project documented by Womack et al. in The
Machine That Changed the World. The Malaysia-based organisations have to
look at Agility as a strategy to develop globally competitive organisations.
Malaysia cannot rely on the migrant workers in the long term and already
these people are being sent home gradually. We need to review the total
process management and ensure all processes are virtually integrated and
simplified.Throughout the TQM era, companies were struggling to make it
work because they did not apply TQM holistically. They did not concurrently
advance leadership and culture to enable fundamental improvement in processes.
On the other hand, the failure of business process re-engineering (BPR)
centres around the same problems of the constraints of existing management
practices and workforce. Both TQM and BPR failures have been attributed
largely to the corporate immune system: the entrenched culture.Becoming
Agile requires you to re-invent your organisation. It requires you to advance
to an empowered, entrepreneurial business culture, transitioning from "silo"
functions to supply chains, from command and control management to total
process management, and from job holders to business people.It is not just
using tools and developing new procedures or systems but a holistic approach
of learning how to work together, to trust and to share. Companies will
have to integrate internally, nationally and then globally, to achieve
significant and fundamental advances in capability, using even more electronic
commerce technology.No doubt it is difficult to predict the future but
MAFF is committed also to help organisations to develop the innovative
and creative power of the people to be able to plan for the future by developing
products and services which has fast concept-to- cash capability. The futuristic
organisations must be able to thrive in the global village. |