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Career Opportunities : Finance Management

admin — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:05:58 +0000

Opportunities for finance professionals can be found in public, private, and non-profit organisations. Some of the areas where finance professionals have excellent scope are Commercial Banking: With burgeoning incomes and deregulation of the banking sector, there are
a large number of banks offering a wide range of services to consumers.A career in banking offers opportunities in accounts, securities,
commodities, financial management, financial and credit analysis, and sales of financial services. Treasury management is also an important
function in banking operations.Examples of commercial banks are SBI and Citibank.
Investment / Merchant Banking: Investment bankers help companies and governments issue stocks and securities. They help investors in
buying and selling these securities and managing their financial assets. They also provide financial advice to companies and high networth
individuals. Examples of investment / merchant bankers are ICICI Bank and DSP Merrill Lynch.Money Management: Money managers hold
stocks and bonds for institutional clients. They also sell these stocks and bonds, and reinvest the funds, to ensure that their clients earn a good rate of return on the money invested. These money managers also provide clients with advice on their financial investments. Mutual Funds such as HDFC Mutual Fund and Kotak Mahindra are examples of Money Managers.

Corporate Finance: Employees working for large corporates and non-banking financial companies raise money to run the business, deploy the funds to make the existing business grow, make strategic acquisitions, and plan for the financial future of the business.Management Consultancy: Several management consultancies recruit students as consultants, who in turn help clients restructure the financial aspects of their business. They also help their clients in mergers and acquisitions. Examples of consultancies are Ernst & Young, and PricewaterhouseCoopers.Insurance: With the insurance sector opening up, there is a growing demand for finance professionals, who understand the need to help individuals and businesses manage risk to protect themselves from accidents / losses. Examples of insurance companies are Max New York and ING Vysya.

Basics Of Finance Management !

admin — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:01:00 +0000

Most commerce students tend to confuse the functional area of finance with accountancy. That is not the case. Both these areas are independent
of each other. The finance function broadly deals with planning for capital and raising it, allocating of capital within and outside the organisation
for maximum return on investment, budgeting, and tax planning. On the other hand,accountancy deals with accounting for the costs or
expenses associated with the resources deployed, manufacturing a product or providing a service, manpower and supply chain costs, margins, and profits.

Students who decide to do an MBA with finance as their specialisation are given a firm grounding in different subjects that cover economic analysis, statistics, methods of management accounting, financial and investment analysis, planning and budgeting, international finance, and banking. Courses in valuation methods, risk management, investment and tax planning are also offered. Students in the first year of their MBA, attend foundation courses in Economics, Business Statistics, and Finance.

There is a mistaken notion that a student with a graduate degree in commerce does well in finance.In fact, a lot of non-commerce students, such as engineers and graduates in science, take up finance as a specialisation and do well. Therefore,what should matter to students who wish to
specialise in Finance, is their interest and aptitude, and not their academic background.Students who are recruited on campus by various
companies for the finance function, join as management trainees. The designations that are assigned to them differ between companies. An
equity analyst at a stock broking firm could have a different designation at another firm, even though the job profile be the same. Finance
professionals eventually become the CFO (Chief Financial Officer) of their company. Sometimes, they may also go on to become the CEO (Chief
Executive Officer) if the company’s main line of work is finance-related.

Systems Management : Basics and Career Options!

admin — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 12:11:17 +0000

The advent of liberalisation in India has seen the influx of several multinational companies setting up operations here. Several others have formed strategic alliances with their Indian partners either by way of investment or joint ventures. Successive Indian governments have lowered quota systems / trade barriers and restricted their involvement to only the core sectors of the economy while playing the role of a facilitator to the other sectors. This has quite literally resulted in a ‘free for all’ situation in the market with companies across sectors vying for their share of the ever-growing pie.

Most of the top B-Schools in the country offer quality courses for students who plan to take up Systems Management as their functional specialisation. Students are taught the basics of all functional areas during the first year of their MBA, so that they are conversant with the basics
of Management Information Systems (MIS),programming languages and the usage of word processing, spreadsheets,and database packages.students who opt to specialise in Systems Management are taught papers in advanced programming and software development by using Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools, concepts of networking, designing different types of networks, interfaces, and tackling networking security-related aspects. Apart from these, they are taught the concepts of different types of databases and how to manage them along with practical training. Many top B-Schools also provide students with exposure to courses that cover the technical and functional aspects that concern Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).

Management graduates with a specialisation in Systems normally take up a minor specialisation in Finance or Marketing, in order to gain a better
understanding of the business processes of the functions involved. Organisations across industry recruit management graduates with a specialisation in Systems. Some of the industries that management graduates with a systems specialisation can join are:
* Organisations involved in the development of software;
* Organisations involved in IT consulting;

* Organisations involved in Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO);
* Firms which are involved in providing Management Consultancy, and
* Organisations involved in e-commerce and other Internet-based services.

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Why Systems Management?

admin — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 05:51:35 +0000

Many students believe that only those who come from an Engineering background or have prior exposure to programming, can specialise in Systems Management, which certainly is not the case. What students need is to have clarity on the kind of career path they would like to pursue and the skill sets they would need to possess in order to deliver on the job assigned to them.It is a misconception that students who choose to specialise in Systems Management end up writing computer programs for the rest of their career. Graduates with a specialisation in Systems
Management are groomed to handle a wide range of responsibilities which includes playing a key role in driving the business growth of the organisation in the short and medium term. They play a key role in re-engineering the business
processes in order to achieve business goals more efficiently. Those who do well professionally sometimes go on to head the organisation.
There are several organisations whose core business is not related to Information Technology,yet recruit management graduates to work in their Systems Department. With geographical barriers being a thing of the past and the world moving towards free trade, organisations are striving to make their products and services available in all parts of the world. The advent of the Internet has seen a sea change in the way companies think and operate. Corporates around the world realise the tremendous potential of an alternate medium of delivery like the internet. Today all global organisations have their own websites not just to disseminate information, but also to offer prospective customers the opportunity to compare costs and purchase good and services at the click of the mouse. The Internet today is universally acknowledged as a parallel marketplace, and its potential when realised fully is expected to unlock
explosive industrial growth across the world. Ecommerce is here to stay. These are indeed interesting times to live in.

Career Options: Operations Management

admin — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 04:30:26 +0000

The major principles / concepts covered in any course that aims at making an operations manager out of you would be: Principles of Managerial Economics and Accounting, Statistics,Operations Planning and Control, Operations Strategy, and application of Information Technology. Besides these core concepts, a considerable exposure to all other areas of management as Human Resources, Finance, and Marketing are a must for an integrated and effective approach to solving business problems related to operations.Irrespective of the institute where you pursue your management education, you could consider taking up this field of management as a career as long as you have the basic skill set / aptitude and the zeal. Of course a management degree from one of the Top B-Schools like the IIMs will definitely propel your career into a more attractive and promising trajectory. Several post-MBA courses and specialisations, FPMs from the IIMs and other colleges and higher studies in colleges, abroad are excellent ways to move into a higher gear as far as your career growth is concerned.

Besides Operations Management, which is a relatively dynamic career – involving people, resources and a variety of management aspects – a relatively more conceptual, scientific and research oriented area is the area of Operations Research. This is purely for people with high aptitude for Mathematics and Statistics, along with a flair for using complex models and software for providing theoretical and optimal solutions for practical and multifarious business problems. Separate programmes oriented towards this are offered by a handful of institutes in India, namely some of the IITs, Indian Statistical Institute Calcutta, IISc Bangalore, and a few others. An MS programme in the U.S. in OR / OM would also be a good bet. The typical career opportunities for a career in Ops in India have seen a significant improvement over the past couple of decades with the arrival
of many MNCs and international businessconsulting firms. The usual entry level activities that a fresher would look at vary between forecasting, supervision, purchasing, traffic management, inventory planning and control, operations scheduling and control, process methods and planning, quality management, warehouse management, and production planning in diverse industries such as banking, manufacturing, and retailing. Career opportunities in Operations Management can also involve work in management consulting firms or the development of computer systems (such as ERP packages) for planning and scheduling. Careers can be made in service organizations involved in activities such as banking, transportation, insurance, and government, as well as manufacturing firms involved in producing industrial and consumer products. Operations Management titles often used are vice
president of manufacturing, vice president of operations, vice president of quality, plant manager, purchasing manager, department supervisor, computer systems analyst, operations analyst, inventory control supervisor, facilities planner, scheduler, first-line supervisor, and buyer. Typical salaries for entry-level positions in India can vary anywhere from INR 6 to 15 lakh p.a. – depending on the profile of the candidate and the B-School he / she is from. After that, the sky is the limit for Ops managers with proven track records and work experience, in India and abroad.

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Basics of Operations Management !

admin — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 01:50:49 +0000

Before starting with the basics here is an example of Operations Management :
Travel agent: “I can get you three days and two nights in Rome for a hundred bucks.”Customer: “How come so cheap?”Travel Agent: “The days are July 11, 12 and 13.The nights are July 21 and 22.”If you are wondering what the travel agent must have been thinking of while making such a preposterous offer, then think twice before writing him off your books. He was simply trying his best to manage his “operations”. In fact,you would have yourself often seen the stewardsand ushers at restaurants trying to manage their operations – more precisely, optimise their capacity utilization – by matching the group-sizes in which guests arrive to the tables of different seating capacities.
Operations management can be one of the most exciting and also the most remunerative of all the various fields of management, provided you’ve got the right aptitude for it.
Let us now see what are the kinds of activities that an operations manager is responsible for. As you would have figured out by now, operations managers are concerned with each step in providing a service or product. They determine what should go into an operating system suchas equipment, labour, tools, facilities, materials, energy, and information and how these inputs can best be obtained and used to satisfy the requirements of the market place. Managers are also responsible for critical activities such as quality management and control, capacity planning, materials management, purchasing, and scheduling. More comprehensively, the typical business decisions addressed by an operations manger include: What products or services should be produced? What must be done so they are produced with high quality and at a good profit? How much of each product or service should be produced? What technologies should a business use? How could information technology be used to manage an organization’s supply chain? How much inventory should be held? How should a facility be laid out? How should schedules be prepared? What process should be used to provide a service or make a product? How can quality be built into a product or service? How should jobs be assigned? In the light of such a description of responsibilities, one would logically find that the key aptitude and skill sets of an operations manager should be problem-solving skills, quantitative reasoning skills, ability to play a role in the efficient and productive operations of an organization, and knowledge of the use of analytical tools for the systematic analysis of organizational processes. Graduates in Engineering, Mathematics and / or Statistics, Science, and Information Technology can hope to excel in this field. Graduates from other streams also can do equally well as long as they possess basic problem solving skills and have sufficient zeal for Ops.
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Operations Management Introduction

admin — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 04:20:51 +0000

TQM, JIT, BPR, SCM, SAP, and ERP are all terms that most of you would have come across in several business related articles in newspapers and magazines. You would have also figured out that these are Ops (Operations Management) jargon. But what do they really mean, and what is Operations Management in the first place?

Every business, big or small, manufacturing or service oriented, involves a certain element of production and delivery of goods or services. This can, in a certain sense, be looked at as the core activity of the organisation, which is supported by various activities such as finance, marketing, systems, and human resources management. Operations Management, in its essence, is all about studying, understanding, and influencing the way organizations manufacture and distribute goods and services.Everything you wear, eat, sit on, use or read comes to you courtesy of the operations managers who organized its production and distribution.

The relevance of Operations Management was first realised in its true business sense with the advent of the Industrial Revolution during the mid-18th century. By the first quarter of the 20th century, along with the development of Scientific Management, Operations Management began to be given its due recognition as an area contributing to the bottom line as well as ensuring maximum customer satisfaction. It was also observed that the entire economy would benefit from the increased productivity and efficiency of business processes. By the early 1970s, with the onset of the Quality Revolution, the significance of Operations Management reached new heights.
Over the past couple of centuries, businesses have gone from competing on cost to competing on quality to competing on flexibility. The latest parameter on which companies are now competing is speed (or delivery time). Operations Management is the one area that can deliver this sort of an edge to companies as they compete. Shorter product and service life cycles, better educated and quality-conscious consumers, and the capabilities of new technology have placed pressures on the operations function to improve productivity while providing a broader array of high-quality products and services. A direct consequence of this is that some of the highest paid business consultants in today’s globalized economy are, in fact, from this very field of management. This should not come as a surprise to you, since often times, for companies with large operations, even a small but incisive suggestion to improve the flow of the operations can help save costs, improve customer satisfaction, and add millions of rupees to the bottom line.
Next Article on Basics of Operations Management and Career Options.
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Marketing Management : Career Opportunities !

admin — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 05:28:53 +0000

In my last article Marketing Basics, i gave a brief introduction on marketing management. Quite often we come across students who want to do an MBA to enhance their skills but aren’t aware of the specialization or the job which they would like to pursue after an MBA. This is because in India College matters more than a Specialization, but to be honest specialization matters a lot and mostly you will find better specialization people at a higher position & earning higher, by better here i mean in which you have interest and are willing to give in your best.
An insight about all these courses for an MBA aspirant is necessary.
A management graduate with a specialization in Marketing will start off as a trainee with an attractive stipend and perks. Better performance ensures quicker ascendancy up the corporate ladder. Each industry has a different nomenclature in terms of designation.What matters is not the designation but the kind of job a management graduate does.Simply put, marketing people are expected to do just one thing – perform. It is not surprising, therefore, to find students who have chosen Marketing as their specialization to go on and
head the organisation later on in their career.

Students who specialise in Marketing during the second year of their MBA can expect to find jobs in both Marketing & Sales. These jobs call for people who have qualities like good communication skills (both written and oral), analytical abilities, and extremely high energy levels. Since Marketing as an activity is directly related to bringing in the revenues this is where ‘all the action’ is.There is a plethora of jobs available for management graduates with specialisation inmarketing after the completion of your MBA as every company that manufactures a product / service needs people to market it to the consumers. Some of the industries that MBAs with a specialisation can hope to land a job in are:
Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) Industry:The products that are marketed here are of low monetary value. The turnover of the product from the shop shelves is pretty high,therefore requiring depth in distribution and market penetration. These products are also consumed more or less immediately once the purchase is made. Some examples of FMCG are soap brands, detergents, cigarettes, edibles, etc.
Consumer Goods Industry: The goods that come under this industry are more the kind that a family uses over a period of time. These products are expensive and therefore purchased very few times in a lifetime. As the price is high, the involvement of the people purchasing the same is high, therefore the buying process takes longer. Products that come under this industry are White Goods (refrigerators & washing machines),consumer electronics (TVs, DVD / VCD players,music systems, video cameras, branded computers, etc.). While these products don’tneed to be available at every nook and corner, companies ensure that every city / town has a few outlets in prominent commercial areas that sell these products.
Industrial Goods: These goods are sold in bulk directly from the point of manufacturing to the customer. The customer may choose to sell the product as it is, or further modify the product and then sell it. Some of the products that come under this category are steel, bulk drugs, wires and cables, electronic boards and switches, paper products, etc.
Service Industry: This is an industry that has been booming of late. Today consumers demand,and get, quality service for the price they pay for a particular service. Management graduates can secure jobs in the consumer finance industry, retailing (such as superstores), IT enabled services (ITES), to name a few.
Consultancy: Management graduates also receive offers from management consulting companies or change agents as they are more popularly known.The job involves studying the problems that different clients of the consultancy face, and then recommend changes that will bring their businesses onto the right track. Some well-known consultants that recruit from the top management institutes in India are McKinsey & Co., Boston Consulting Group, Lehman Brothers, etc.
International Marketing: With trade barriers across the world being lowered, a lot of companies are also marketing their products and services abroad. These products and services could be as diverse as bulk drugs, consumer electronics,apparel and garments, ITES (such as BPO), etc.
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Basics of Marketing Management – Specialisation!

admin — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 04:59:36 +0000

Marketing Management is one of the oldest forms of management, talking in crude terms we can say if one knows How to sell you can own a business and therefore a manager.
The functional area of Marketing involves the concept development and delivery of a quality product / service to cater to the emerging / existing needs of the consumers at an affordable price. It also involves the creation of awareness among potential consumers with regard to the existence and availability of the
product / service, its ability to satisfy their needs better than the competitors.
Marketing as a function comprises both Marketing and Selling. Marketing as an activity includes new product development,advertisement, brand management, development of channels of distribution to deliver a
product / service and providing promotional inputs for the sales team to ensure the success
of a brand.

The 4 Ps of Marketing

Product: By product we mean the physical attributes as well as the core and perceived values of the product. This involves conducting marketresearch and then going on to develop a qualityproduct / service that has all the attributes that are needed by consumers. It also includes packaging of the product in such a manner so as to attract the consumer to buy the product. It
also involves providing the customers the products in variants of packaging to enable ease
of usage / consumption. For example, most soft drink brands are available in products of 300ml,
500ml, 1litre, and 2 litres.
Price: By price we mean the price a consumer is willing to pay in monetary terms in exchange for goods and services purchased. This involves pricing the product after taking into account both
internal and external factors. Internal factors include manufacturing cost and overheads.
External factors include costs associated with advertising, setting up distribution channels and
its associated costs, margins, prevailing market prices for similar products of competitors, and
demand for the product in the market.
Place: By place we mean the distribution channel used to ensure the delivery of a product / service from the point of manufacture to the point of purchase. This involves deciding on the kind of distribution channel that a company wishes to employ to ensure availability of product / service
at a point closest to the consumer. The kind of channel a company decides to use will vary
depending on the kind of product / service it wishes to market. While Eureka Forbes uses the
direct marketing approach to sell its vacuum cleaners, Hindustan Lever uses a channel
consisting of C&F agents, distributors, sub-distributors, and retailers to sell its soap bars
and detergents. However, given the ever-changing market scenario in the country,
companies are willing to look at alternative channels of delivery. For example, HLL today tries
to market some of its cosmetic products by using direct marketing.
Promotion: By promotion we mean the different media used by a company to achieve greater visibility and sales for any given product / service. The media used could be a mix of print media (such as newspapers and magazines), visual media (television), outdoor media (billboards, banners, pamphlets, posters, customer contact programmes), audio media (radio), etc.
The different components of the 4 Ps that a company uses to market its product are known as the marketing mix.

Coming up next Why one should pursue a Management Course in Marketing !

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