'Companies with global ambitions are turning to the major international markets'

Equity, popular at the right price

How are the Indian companies performing in the London market? The answer is, “Not bad,” according to Tom Troubridge, head of the Capital Markets Group of the PricewaterhouseCoopers, UK.
“Despite market turmoil in January, Vedanta Resources, the FTSE 100-listed Indian mining company has performed strongly in line with the mining sector,” he substantiates, during the course of an e-mail interaction with Busine ss Line last week, while on a visit to India. “Recent AIM (Alternative Investment Market) flotations such as Greenco and DQ Entertainment are trading above their issue price.”

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Information could be an input in both manufacturing and service processes

‘Lean’ is more than a cost-cutting tool

Lean, you may be happy to learn, is hep in factories. “Lean manufacturing is the production of goods using less of everything: less material, less time, less energy, less human effort, less manufacturing space,” defines G.V. Dasarathi in a January 14-dated article on http://inhome.rediff.com. “The Nano is lean. It uses less steel, less plastic, less space and less energy to run.”
And you can make a fat folder with ‘lean’ news such as: Cisco speaking of how its customers realise the benefits of lean supply chain initiatives across a myriad of industries ( http://www.automation.com/ ); General Cable reporting better price realisation, and cost improvements from ‘lean’ initiatives ( http://www.earthtimes.org/ ); and the need to adapt lean-production programs to China’s ‘tradition of mass mobilisation,’ as ‘Operation China: From Strategy to Execution,’ a management guide by two McKinsey & Co. consultants, Jimmy Hexter and Jonathan Woetzel, which James Pressley reviews in http://www.bloomberg.com/ .

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'Business discipline drives growth!'

Risks that control systems face from `creative responses'

Despite the widespread attention given to risk management, we get jolted by one major business failure or the other, almost routinely, with news reports that speak of bigger frauds (as in the case of SocGen), and massive losses, as for example of CitiGroup and Merrill Lynch. Are we learning newer lessons in risk management in the process? Is the risk appetite of businesses soaring dangerously and unsustainably?

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Revenue growth should be tied closely to drivers that impact revenue — such as price, volume, and customer satisfaction

A management-reporting framework beyond the balanced scorecard

Can management reporting be based on common information architecture? “Yes,” says Jeby Cherian, Head, Global Business Solution Centre, IBM India, Bangalore. The infrastructure modifications that most organisations have adopted in the last decade provide an opportunity to improve current management reporting, he explains.

With common information architecture, organisations will be able to “integrate the underlying transaction engine with a data warehouse and decision support engine that enable analytics, and deliver the information through a portal to specific roles.”

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