Discovering the new horizons of management: Measuring non material

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Discovering the new horizons of management: Measuring non material

Challenge №1. What way do we need to measure non material?

In the context of the article we will be interested in two aspects of intangible assets, more specifically:

Methods, technologies and standards, which are used for optimization of business processes, in other words all that improve effectiveness of business at the expense of reduction of time needed for production, reduction of expenditures and the improvement of products’ quality in comparison with the competitors’ ;

Methods, technologies and standards, which are used for managing loyalty of groups of people, which act as: demanders of the products (regulatory authorities; associations; vendors and others) – all that increase efficiency of business at the expense of increase in a turn-over and the enterprise capital.

The first deduction is: traditional financial model (accounting records and budget management) in no condition with the proper effectiveness to solve the problems, which are opposing managers about necessity of managing the nonmaterial assets. For the successful business administration it requires deployment of nonfinancial criterions (alongside, of course, with financial).

Challenge №2. What exactly should we manage?

The last example is “Customer Relationship” conception that recently became very fashionable. Most of the local structures, which the company had to work with, thought absolutely sincerely, that it was enough simply to operate automatically reception and processing of customers’ calls (imitation of methodology) to enroot the conception. But it was not the main problem – quite the reverse, it could be easily solved. The problem was about incomprehension that this conception initially focused on managing exactly contacts with clients. This led marketing departments to weaken essentially the managing of “potential” (potential not in traditional financial meaning in other words who did not pay money yet, but in nonfinancial meaning in other words by those who did not contact with company still in one or another way) clients by making the emphasis exactly on “adaptation CRM”. The most important source of income, the one which makes costumers to do the first call/resort to the company and to land up in the ambit of control of CRM, was left without any control. And if there are instances when CRM has been understood right and had not been used instead of managing of marketing, then it is too difficult to remember occurrence when all business subsystems (“Customer Relationship” and Brand Management, Quality Management, Budgeting) took concerted actions.

The second deduction: the management of business is more than managing of all business processes/assets; it is managing of all business processes/assets as a whole thing. Taking into account that such a methodology exists for material assets and that material assets as well as nonmaterial ones are still assets anyway, it’s possible to suppose that methodology of managing of both seamlessly should be close to budgeting which has already approved itself in practice. You can be convinced about that by reading further.