 future state of your Corporate Affairs department. Here are a few things that your GCA department should consider.
The role that Global Corporate Affairs plays in your organization is broad, but should be focused on supporting the management of your reputation, brand and core purpose through marketing and communications.
44% of respondents surveyed by Skylight believe the GCA team has a broad set of responsibilities covering internal and external communications and marketing.
Global Corporate Affairs practitioners should seek to interact and address feedback from both internal and external stakeholders. The most successful GCA professionals deliver messages thoughtfully and deliberately so that all interactions are mutually beneficial.
89% of respondents surveyed by Skylight report that they already regularly interact with both internal and external stakeholders.
Your GCA department should play a crucial role in understanding your organization’s operating environment. GCA practitioners need to develop a global focus and take advantage of technologies or internal networks allowing them to monitor changes in the corporate environment.
Most GCA professionals track data, such as customer sentiment and market opportunities. To have a comprehensive view of the environment surrounding your organization, your GCA team needs to track long-term metrics affecting the industry and supply chain, so you can be ahead of potential issues or trends.
Only 22% of respondents surveyed report that they monitor supply chain trends and development.
Less than 50% of respondents surveyed by Skylight report following a formal, documented process for seeking input from others in the organization when formulating their GCA strategy.
To realize its objectives and develop a best-in-class Corporate Affairs strategy, your GCA team will need to develop a well-thought out and measurable action plan. We have a full ENGAGE Model to help you get started. Download the framework to learn the functional role Corporate Affairs plays in today’s business environment, 6 key mandates to prepare your GCA action plan for the future and best practices for implementing and auditing an all-encompassing strategy. The full ENGAGE Model is available here.
To learn more about what should go into the GCA Action Plan of the future, download the full ENGAGE Model.This morning I went to the bank to cash in savings bonds from my dad's estate to pay for our trip to Poland in August. Naturally the transaction took some time. (I was glad I wasn't behind myself in line.) Purchased by my dad in the early 1980s, the bonds earned 7.5 percent interest. They were worth not quite twice their face value; my dad had paid half the face value. He bought them for his retirement. I think he was 65; he died at age 69. So they now send his granddaughter, whom he missed meeting by three weeks, and me to Poland to see where he grew up and to meet my ciocia Helen, his only remaining sister.
He went back once to visit, in 1966. I remember the cheeses he brought back, which were confiscated at customs. I remember them, however, because they made his suitcase smell horrible. Dad's stinky cheeses passed into family lore. The following year he had another of his episodic breakdowns. That, too, I remember. I fantasize that I will understand his illness better when I go to Poland.
The return on the bonds makes me, for the purpose of this trip anyway, a rich American. I won't have to worry about money. I thought that time and interest had done the work of giving the bonds value. But it was my dad who did the work. I have received a gift from him, long after he died.Reminder ZARA employees were slipping notes into clothing asking to send help and that they were not getting paid. Purchasers of ZARA in Turkey found them in their clothing. Opt away fast fashion when you can.
ima just get a tattoo, what my parents gunna do take it off????
love me or die.
Avril Lavigne was right, What the Hell.The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented levels of disruption and uncertainty for companies across all sectors and geographies. And even in the best of times, many management teams struggle to sustain control over short-term cash flows and managing the working capital that drives them. However, the COVID-19 crisis has been unique in its combination of challenges, making mitigation even more complex.
On this episode of CFO Weekly, we sit down with Peter Woolery. Peter is the Chief Financial Officer at Summit Bicycles, and began his career with the company cleaning floors, toilets, and assembling kid’s bicycles for the holidays, working his way all the way to the executive team.
While the bicycle industry is already a highly seasonal industry, seeing peak demand during warmer months, and waning demand during the Winter, 2020 has been especially volatile for the industry, and for Summit as a business.
When all the gyms and fitness facilities closed back in May, they saw a huge spike in demand for bicycles, more so than a typical year. Bicycles were taking months, or in some cases for particular models, up to a year to get into stock for waiting customers.
What this did mean was an enormous jump in online interest, as people were sequestered in their homes and left without their typical fitness routines. They turned online, and began ordering bicycles.
“We are up over 700% in online sales for 2020, which has really forced us to adjust our practices as a company," Woolery said.
Beyond just an increase in demand, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced companies like Summit to change the way that they're doing business, particularly when concerning inventory and ordering.
No longer just selling what is in stock and refilling it the next week, companies like Summit are having to sell against future inventory. In order to secure bikes for the following model year, they’re having to back-order those up front and adjust systems to account not for what they have on hand, but to report on what they’re going to have in the future.
And as you can imagine, this presents particular challenges for current bicycle sales, as well as dealing with customers who want to order a bicycle to use right now and don’t want to have to wait nine months or longer for their item.
“We've had to adjust our systems to not just report what we have, but build new systems so that our frontline sales staff can communicate to our customer, what the eta is on a particular bike, what the probability is that it'll show up at that time, and then adjust our selling practices to communicate what might be a better option that we can get in a more realistic time, or we might have in one of our warehouses right now," Woolery said.
It’s safe to say that the bicycle industry has seen an increase in demand over the last year, but they’ve also had an increasingly complex set of problems when it comes to sourcing and supply chain.
In the wake of the initial COVID-19 outbreak, a lot of the bicycle products that were coming from China were relocated to places like Vietnam or Cambodia. And while those parts of the world were shut down quickly, they were also reopened far more quickly than parts of the United States.
But production hasn’t caught up with demand yet. So most of the spare or replacement bicycle parts needed for a company’s service department are increasingly difficult to get, as most of the parts are being used for new bicycles, not repairs or services.
As you may imagine, even with a steady cash flow coming in from the order of new bicycles, the supply chain disruptions have made things challenging. Rather than invest dollars into future orders, companies have had to divert dollars and convert them into physical inventory. Bicycle shops have much more inventory than in the past, at least that’s the case with Summit.
So from a CFO’s point of view, the challenge is finding where on the balance sheet the dollars are actually allocated. Are they allocated to current inventory, future orders, or backorders?
One of the things that Peter did was to write a program to view cash flow in real time. He wasn’t getting good day-to-day sales info from the point of sale systems, so he wrote a program that allows him to see live cash flows every day, updated every five minutes, in order to better update weekly cash flow projections. To see where they need to convert dollars into future orders.
While 2020 has been hard for a lot of businesses, there have been some silver linings to come from the pandemic. One of Peter’s highlights was the increase in automation for things that normally relied on human input.
They are seeing tremendous volume in online sales, but one of the bottlenecks they were experiencing was simply entering those sales into the point of sale system. Now that they’ve written a program to do that for them, it’s made a huge difference in the efficiency and productivity that the teams are experiencing.
And after things have returned to normal, they hope to build on those automations to not only get better productivity out of the staff, but to make their jobs easier and make them look forward to coming to work every day and getting people out and moving.<filename>.eslintrc.json
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