Phil’s Blog

This week chapter focuses on the final aspect of business management, being that the purpose of any businesses is to serve a customer market and make a profit doing it; this chapter clarifies three elements that influence a company well being, productivity, quality and safety. The supervisory management philosophy will greatly affect the manner those elements will be supervised. To take one aspect in the process, there are various ways for a manager to control productivity. One way to look at productivity is to regard it as the ratio of the total outputs to the total cost; this aspect permits the manager to know the production cost of each unit. This knowledge helps the manager in planning a financial budget.
However, productivity is also the ratio of the total goods produced to the total hours it took to produce those goods; this aspect of productivity guide the manager in managing time. However to be efficient the manager needs to incorporate both aspects in his or her planning. In the situation that there is a need to improve productivity the manager has a few options at hand. If one looks at total output versus total hours, one way to improve productivity might be to get better machinery, or train the employees, which will also affects cost. If one looks at cost versus profit, then one way to improve productivity is to raise the revenue by producing more at the same cost, another way is to reduce cost but still produce the same amount, which may affect the number of hours spent on a project.
No matter how the manager approaches this problem, raising productivity can not come at the cost of safety or quality. The goods or services produced must still follow quality standard, and any safety regulations imposed by OSHA.