Category: Business Management

Advanced Real Estate Software Solutions For Better Business Management

The incredible expansion of real estate business over the last few years has left many property developers and property managers with administrative challenges. By embracing powerful and reliable applications and real estate management strategies, property developers, builders and agents can gain tangible efficiencies that substantially lower costs of acquisition and streamline internal as well as external operations.

Advantages
Modern real estate management software solutions help property developers, builders and agents in efficiently maintaining office operations and their customers. It also allows developers to save a lot of money and fulfill the arising needs of the customers. The biggest advantage of software solutions is that it fosters company growth, brings more leads and helps nurture clients. It also empowers builders to better serve the needs of the clients in a controlled and secure manner.

Powerful Features
The latest real estate software blends a powerful and advanced CRM with sales automation tools with the flexibility of a cloud based platform for enhanced productivity. You have the freedom to optimize sales and grow revenue at the same time. Whether youre in your office or on the move, you will never miss your sales opportunity with the help of commercial real estate software. The builder interface of the application helps in managing your land sales and house construction from start to finish. It provides an added opportunity of tracking the progress of every part of the job to the managers.

Property developers and managers can grow your sales network and upload and manage invoicing and variations to the software directly for better compliance and audit ability. The software is widely used by the industry specialist as it is helpful in engaging purchasers with custom access to view the progress of their purchase within projects.

Potential
The software is known for its innovativeness, intelligent execution and intuitive insights. It is not only a property management software solution, but a perfect automated lead nurturing software solution. Property managers can qualify their leads in much smarter, easier, and faster manner. It simply segment leads into hot and cold stages, significantly reduce sales conversion timelines and increase sales.

This real estate software for builders has secure data storage facility and is completely flexible, efficient and secure. There are multiple measures that help to protect your invaluable customer data. It extends the existing information architecture and helps you align business operations.

So, if you want to eliminate your extensive paperwork and introduce agility then real estate software solution is the best answer. It will increase the productivity of the business and help in settling all transactions and activities automatically and online.

Strategic Reasons Why You Need A Business Management Team

I have watched or listened to several successful entrepreneurs and drop out billionaires being interviewed. I have read several business books and studied the business success strategies of famous entrepreneurs; and they all seem to share one thing in common. They all attribute their rapid business growth to their business management team. Now why is a business team important to an entrepreneur? Why should you build an in-house business management team when you can always seek external advice? What impact will a business team have on your business?

These are usually the questions I receive when I discuss the importance of having a business team with my protgs. You may be a small business owner operating a mom and pop shop but I still want you to know that you need a business team. It may not be your short term goal but you need to include it in your long term plan.

“Individuals don’t win in business; teams do.” – Sam Walton

No successful entrepreneur assembled a business management team in a day; it’s a process that can take as long as ten year before the perfect team assembles. Finding the right business team is definitely not an easy task and it is one of the ten major business challenges entrepreneurs face when starting a business. Now why do you need a business management team? Well, below are ten strategic reasons why you building a business team should be your long term goal.

Ten Strategic Reasons why You Need a Business Management Team

1. Raising Capital: One of the key reasons why startup entrepreneurs don’t get the venture capital is because they are trying to raise capital alone. A business mentor of mine once said that venture capitalists prefer an average product with an excellent business team than an excellent product with an average business team. If you should consider this statement; you will come to acknowledge that it’s the truth in its entirety. A business team is vital to the process of raising capital for your business; in fact, it increases your chances of securing the capital. Show me an entrepreneur that raised billions of dollars in capital and I will show you an entrepreneur backed by a strong business management team. Just like said in the investment world; money always follow management.

2. Taking advantage of new or existing opportunities: Having your own business management team will give you the leverage to take advantage of business opportunities effortlessly. A business team will be your eyes, ears and nose in the business world; they will not only help you sniff out opportunities but will also help you create opportunities out of thin air.

“A business idea is just another idea. But an idea backed by a strong feasibility, a thorough business plan and a smart team is no longer an idea. It’s now a solid business opportunity worth pursuing.”

3. Strategic business development: Do you want to grow your business from the inside? Do you want to strengthen your bottom line? Then build your own business management team. Strategic business development is not the doing of an individual but a collective effort of a business team. Employee performance programs, staff motivation and operational excellence are part of the duty of a business team.

4. Rapid expansion and growth: Take a close look at companies that grows rapidly and stands strong in times of economic recess and you will find a strong business management team behind such companies. The massive outside expansion of any company is the handiwork of the business team. An entrepreneur visualizes while the business team draws the plan; critique the plan and executes the business plan. For instance, take a look at the rapid acquisition move taken by Oracle Corporation; buying up a total of 57 companies within five years. That’s the power of a good management driven company.

5. Business leverage: How is a company able to operate successfully in different sectors of the economy? How can an entrepreneur successfully run a business conglomerate? The answer is leverage. The leverage of a business team is the reason successful entrepreneurs became billionaires effortlessly. Leverage is the reason why entrepreneurs such as J. Paul Getty and Carlos Slim Helu are able to run over 200 companies without burning themselves out. The leverage of a business team is a form of intellectual leverage. Just as a man is known by the friends he keeps; so is a business respected by the management team it keeps.

“Successful businessmen share the ability to hire people smarter than they are.” – Dillard Munford

“People are definitely a company’s greatest asset. It doesn’t make any difference whether the company’s product is cars or cosmetics. A company is only as good as the people it keeps.” – Mary Kay Ash

6. Increase confidence of the investors: Just like I stated above; money follows management and who provides the money? The answer is the investors. Nothing inspires or boosts the confidence of an investor than the professionalism of the business management team piloting the affairs of the company he/she invested in. Have you tried raising capital before? Have you tried sourcing for contracts before? Have you tried sending a business proposal to another company before? Have you ever tried selling a business before? Or better still buying a business? Have you ever taken a company public before? If you have engaged in any of these acts; you will come to accept the fact that one of the most popular questions investors ask is this:
Who is on your team?

Who on your team has taken a company public before?

Who on your team has experience in business management?

The questions above are real life questions asked by investors because they feel comfortable hearing the fact that the managers of their investments are competent.

7. Increase the entrepreneur’s credibility and competence: Observe the words of successful entrepreneurs and drop out billionaires carefully; and you will see that they attribute much of their success to their team. Have you ever wondered why some drop outs end up successful business owners? The reason is because they built their business on the shoulders of intellectual giants; who happen to be members of their business management team. An entrepreneur can never know it all and that’s why he/she relies on the calculative initiative of the business team. Show me an entrepreneur backed by a weak business team and I will show you an incompetent entrepreneur. So if being recognized as an entrepreneur of credibility and competence sounds good enough to be added to your resume; then build your own in-house business management team.

8. Strategic innovative thinking: Innovative companies are usually companies driven by a strong management team. Observe companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and Sony; and you will come to realize that these companies have being built, driven and sustained competitively on innovation. Now who are the engineers of innovation? It’s the business team; the brains behind the company. Tactical approach to issues, detailed competitive analysis and strategic thinking are benefits derived from having your own business team; so would you rather not have one?

9. Critical problem solving: How does a company survives a recession? How does a company survive in a fierce market? The answer still lies in the team. Entrepreneurs are known as critical problem solvers but I also want to add that problem solving is a product of collective strategies and ideas put together by a group of individuals; and such individuals in this case is your business team. Critical problem solving is the reason why teams go on brainstorming sessions. Now tell me, how do you create a brainstorming session when you don’t have a business team? I leave that for you to answer.

10. Increases the value of the business: Value appreciation is the last but not the least reason why you need a business management team. One of the most important assets of a business is the management team because with a good business management team; every other asset can be synergized into yielding positive results for the company. The reason why I call a business team your most important asset is because other assets are easy to create or control once the right business team is in place. So instead of focusing on improving your lifestyle; acquiring investments individually or running your business solely, I will advice you first build a business management team and the rest will fall in place.

How To Achieve The Kaizen Morale

Kaizen is a popular part of business management wherein managers use this as a way to suit their own environment. The basic concept of this is to restructure and organize all the aspects of the business system in order to make sure that everything remains at their peak efficiency. The key persons involved here are the employees. This is oftentimes used by the company so that they can boost the productivity of the workers by means of changing their traditional ways and helping them accept change. Heightening up the self esteem of the workers is one of the main goals of businessmen when they apply the kaizen principle to their organization. This is because they believe that through kaizen morale, they can execute change into their company effectively.

So what is this kaizen morale? Quite obviously, this can be attained through the use of the kaizen philosophy. In order to do this, there are five kaizen elements that you should establish in your business management system. These are quality circles, improved morale, teamwork, personal discipline and suggestions for improvement. All of these will lead you to personal improvement through kaizen particularly with regards to the attitude of your employees and their approach to the job that they have been assigned with. Quality circles pertain to the groups that have to meet with one another in order for them to discuss the subject about quality levels. These levels are concerned on all the aspects of the operations in the company. On the other hand, improved kaizen morale refers to the strong morale that exists within the workforce. This is definitely a crucial step towards the achievement of long term productivity and efficiency. With improved morale, you can use this as part of your kaizen system to serve as
the foundational task when it comes to keeping contact with the morale of your employees.

Teamwork is all about how to make your company even stronger. Always remember that a well-built organization relies on every effort of the people within that company no mater what type of task they have to do. The main aim of kaizen here is to help the employees as well as the management to view themselves as members of the group or team rather than thinking that they are competing with their co-workers. Meanwhile, personal discipline is where individuals set on their minds the belief that they cannot succeed without each member. Thus, everyone should be strong and knowledgeable in order for the team to succeed. Lastly, with regards to the fifth of the kaizen elements, suggestions for improvement are all about requesting feedback from all the team members. It is therefore the job of the management to ensure that each and every problem is addressed before they bring about significant effects into your business.

You can also improve and attain kaizen morale through using the other principles that exist in the kaizen system. You will need to standardize several possible aspects of your company and remove all the inefficiencies. Kaizen helps you in understanding that the productivity of the company lies in the skills and the knowledge of everyone in the organization.

th Century Business Methods Used Today Are The Problem, Not The Solution

Throughout the 20th century, various business methods for operating and developing the company have been contrived and refined, becoming the conventional business methods that we use today. We improve management and effect business change by laying new contrived business methods and structures over the methods in place. Even with all the improvements, we continue to have fundamental problems with re-organizations, intangible assets, accounting limitations, cost control, information management, alignment, etc. Even with all the business organization and management methods, we still have not found the one right method to organize and manage the company business.
Until now. Result-performance Management, newly launched in 2008, provides the one right method to organize and manage the business in the 21st century company, and leave problems with 20th century business methods behind.

Conventional business methods are the generally-accepted wrong ways

Over the past decade, we implemented breakthroughs like business process re-engineering, business transformation methods, business performance management, and enterprise resource planning. But, these turned out to be just new names for conventional business methods to do the same old things.

Why are there so many different business methods to do the same thing? Why isn’t there just one right business method? It is simply because all of these different business methods are wrong methods, and we do not know the one right business method. Since all the different business methods we use are wrong, we can only define the right method by identifying the wrong methods that are generally-accepted. The basis for our management and accounting methods is not that they are the fundamentally-sound and understood right business methods, but that they are the generally-accepted wrong business methods. When we come up with the one right business method, it will be known and accepted, and all of the wrong business methods will be obsolete.

Conventional thinking prevents the new breakthrough needed

Since the beginning of business, no one has ever stopped to think, “Are the business methods that have always been used the best business methods”. We accept existing business methods as the basis and try to improve the methods.

New business methods contrive ways to alleviate the symptoms of fundamental problems inherent in the way things have always been done. This we can do ad infinitum without ever solving the problems. How many methods do we have and how many books have been written about corporate governance, business organization, change management, investment management, capital development, performance management, cost and value accounting and management, solution alignment, intangible assets, business collaboration, etc. Why do we keep coming up with new business methods, if previous business methods were supposed to have solved the problem?

Management improvement books are written using the existing body of knowledge or published record as the valid basis. Many of the books cut, reorganize, and paste what has already been written. Other books describe innovative ways enterprises are coping with contrived business methods. These approaches prevent new breakthroughs and can, at best, produce some incremental improvement.

Conventional 20th century business methods do not organize and manage the business

The problem is that conventional business organization and management methods do not organize and manage the business. Instead we contrived business methods to organize and manage people, departments, functions, activities, duties, positions, tasks, and numerous other entities. Each business method defines these entities in its own way. Each method is laid over the business obscuring the actual business and compounding the problems of business change. The many different business methods describe the company with different entities and definitions creating information complexity and proliferation of information systems.

The organization structure is laid over the business. The business changes, while the organization structure remains rigid, building pressure for reorganization and upheaval. Other business methods and structures are laid over the organization structure. The actual business lies hidden under a proliferation of methods.

We need one right way to organize and manage the business

We need to step back and take a completely new look at the basics of our company business and build the one right method to organize and manage the business. Conventional business organization and management methods manage contrived entities, but fail to specifically define the business and manage specific business entities.

The business definition is investments in capital as solutions of worth utilized for costs and effectiveness of performance to produce value and quality in results. Conventional business management methods do not identify and manage the three entities that define the business and must be managed:

1. Results: Specific economic outputs of value and quality produced at any level from business performance
2. Capital: Specific invested capital available as solutions to be utilized in business performance
3. Performance: Utilization of a specific solutions of worth to incur costs to produce specific results

These three entities are used in Result-performance Management (R-pM) to organize the company. Any other entities used must be defined in terms of results produced, capital investments as solutions, and performance in solutions utilized to produce results.
The business organization changes naturally as results are added, changed, or deactivated. The business organization changes with each new capital investment to implement solutions or to discontinue old solutions. Human capital personnel and capabilities are deployed as solutions where they have the capability to manage and produce results. Other capital is deployed as well as specific solutions to be utilized in performance to produce a result. The business organization changes with each redeployment of a solution to be utilized in performance to produce a result.

R-pM is the new breakthrough needed to organize the business

R-pM is a new breakthrough that defines the results that enterprise management wants to produce and adds and deletes results as needed. R-pM defines the capital utilized as solutions in performance, to show how costs are incurred. R-pM deploys solutions to be utilized in performance to the results to be produced to show total performance costs against the result value created.
Once the organization is simplified, R-pM manages the enterprise in three dimensions for ongoing advantage

1. Result: Manage economic output to reach revenue goals
2. Performance: Manage invested capital in performance to reach profit-margin goals
3. Management: Manage operation and development goals by time period for return and strategic value

R-pM develops new capital solutions over time to create value in new results. R-pM governs the company business performance over time to create strategic value.

R-pM is one simple integrated business method for 21st century management

R-pM removes conventional business complexity and provides one simple integrated business method that eliminates re-organizations, intangible assets, misalignments, ad-hoc development, change management, and unknown costs. R-pM enables strategic value creation, result value-quality chains, transparent governance, innovation technology management, beneficial development, cost and value accounting, result-performance optimization, business collaboration, consulting professionalism, solution-sharing, and many other advantages prevented by 20th century business methods.
When we employ R-pM, we have the one fundamental right business method to organize and manage any enterprise for 21st century management, and leave all the obsolete wrong business methods and unsolvable 20th century problems behind.

Monitoring printers using SNMP

I would like to share an interesting experience of using the SNMP protocol for centralized monitoring of printer availability and parameters.

My company does quite a lot of printing. The pool of printing units includes various printers and MFU large printers as well as medium and small SOHO (Small Office Home Office) class ones. All of them are network devices of predominantly two manufacturers – HP and Canon. About a year ago the company management set the task of collecting data for analysis of their functioning availability, downtime, workload, and consumption of paper, cartridges, and other consumables and spare parts. Besides, some data should be promptly submitted to the senior executives of both our internal providing services and external servicing companies.

In my opinion, collecting information from printer statistics pages every day is tiresome because there are rather a lot of printers in the organization. The option with parsing statistics web pages did not suit us for the reason of heterogeneity and the absence of static web addresses. I decided to use SNMP.

SNMP is a UDP-based protocol for control and monitoring. Almost all devices having a network interface support this protocol and allow using it to collect performance data. Data available via the SNMP protocol are also arranged in hierarchical order (OID). So it turns out that one can request the printer for an OID value with a definite number. Using special utility programs – server monitoring tools makes the monitoring of printers far more convenient.

Personally, I am using IPHost Network Monitor. This program allows an automatic search for all printers and other network-enabled devices (network discovery), carrying out data collection on the functioning of printing units, generating primary reports for subsequent analysis, and send timely alerts when performance or availability problems occur.

Monitoring system usage has shown:

1.The printer manufacturers try to keep to a uniform MIB structure and accordingly the group of OIDS (printer-accounting): 1.3.6.1.4.1.11.2.3.9.4.2.1.1.16.1 will be common for all HP printers, which can be actually received via SNMP. There are such OIDS in it as: printed-media-duplex-count 1.3.6.1.4.1.11.2.3.9.4.2.1.1.16.1.1.3 (duplex printing two-sided printing)
media3-page-count 1.3.6.1.4.1.11.2.3.9.4.2.1.4.1.8.3.3.3 (A3 size printing).

2.There may arise a problem with getting specific information on required printer because OIDs can be different with different printer manufacturers. IPHost Network Monitor can request information on all possible OIDs for the printer and has a built-in MIB browser.

3.For device identification in the other company departments and just for clearness it is better to use the printer serial number, net name, IP as a monitor name.

IPHost Network Monitor deserves a special recommendation as a solution for printer monitoring. This program significantly simplifies the monitoring of printing equipment because of:

– supports printers of most manufacturers;

– does not require profound SNMP protocol knowledge;

– automatically scans the network and finds printing and other equipment;

– allows setting a real-time monitoring of the condition of network printers in real time;

– has an advanced notification system;

– has a web interface for remote control of availability and performance.

After implementation of paper consumption monitoring, I can see several steps to enhance the SNMP monitoring of printers in our company:

– monitoring for paper supply

– control print queues

– control the refilling of cartridges and consumption of inks and toners

– keep a record of consumables for copiers, scanners, and multifunction printers (MFP)