Chapter 1 Part III

I shall talk more about the next area.

4) Effective and Efficient Execution of Orders - Business Systems like inventory management, delivery system and others.

In the fourth sub areas proposed by Sun Zi, it queries whether an army is able to execute orders efficiently and effectively.

In war, if the orders are not clearly passed down to everyone in the army, confusion will prevail and would render the whole army useless and in the end the general would not be able to execute his strategy. So we can see from here is that strategies can be formulated but there would be risk in carrying out the strategy. In Romance of Three Kingdoms, we have marveled at the strategies that was formulated by Kong Ming, or more often known as Zhuge Liang, but if the generals that he delegated the assignment to was not able to execute them well, his strategies would be useless no matter how good it sound on paper.

Relating this to business, I think the most prominent thing that a company should go for is to improve the business systems in his company. Business systems could be logistic/supply chain systems, sales processing systems, HR systems and many more. As most companies, operate or expand, they should aim to improve their systems. Make it more convenient and effective for the staffs that are using it. Sometimes, as the companies expand too fast, like catering to several overseas market or relocation of some functions of the company to other countries and so on, some requirements that were needed could be redundant and new requirements & regulations or technology must be added to improve it.

So how do you improve the systems in your company? Well, need I say more, ask the people who are using the system. For example, for sales processing system, ask your salespeople, admin staff for the system. You may include your IT personnel to see if there could be some cost effective automation integrated into the process.

All in all, give your staff the necessary resources and convenience to carry out their task effectively and efficiently. Hope this bit of information would help those that are reading this. Cheers!