Be the Manager You supervise a team of marketing analysts who work on different

Question

Be the Manager

You supervise a team of marketing analysts who work on different snack products in a large food products company.

The marketing analysts have recently received undergraduate degrees in business or liberal arts and have been on the job between one and three years. Their responsibilities

include analyzing the market for their respective products, including competitors; tracking current marketing initiatives; and planning future marketing campaigns. They also need to

prepare quarterly sales and expense reports for their products and estimated budgets for the next three quarters; to prepare these reports, they need to obtain data from financial

and accounting analysts assigned to their products. When they first started on the job, you took each marketing analyst through the reporting cycle, explaining what needs

to be done and how to accomplish it and emphasizing the need for timely reports. Although preparing the reports can be tedious, you think the task is pretty straightforward and

easily accomplished if the analysts plan ahead and allocate sufficient time for it When reporting time approaches, you remind the analysts through e-mail messages and emphasize

the need for accurate and timely reports in team meetings. You believe this element of the analysts' jobs couldn't be more stra·1ghtforward. However, at the end of each quarter,

the majority of the analysts turn their reports in a day or two late, and, worse yet, your own supervisor (to whom the reports are eventually turned in) has indicated that information

is often missing and sometimes the reports contain errors. Once you started getting flak from your supervisor about this problem, you decided you had better fix things

quickly. You met with the marketing analysts, explained the problem, told them to turn the reports in to you a day or two early so you could look them over, and more generally

emphasized that they really needed to get their act together. Unfortunately things have not improved much, and you are spending more and more of your own time

doing the reports. What are you going to do?

Evaluate the case and propose a solution. Prioritise the steps to be taken in your approach, be systematic and motivate your assertions ?

Explanation / Answer

As a manager i would certainly advise them to be a good listner and keep on watching the developments so that they are in aposition to understand the bussiness minutely and later work on the growth of the business. Its true and correct that the freshers have less knowledge about the FMCG fast moving consumer goods industry.It requires a detailed analysis before they prepare the budget and do forward planning for the business. As a team one has to ensure that deep knowledge of the products has to be there so that Annual business plan is made based on the consultation with the team. Approach is very clear that is understand the business and than put the best foot forward for analyzing the situation and later remedy can be worked out. Expence report and the sales report needs to be updated having the excel sheet ready and filling the data on daily basis so that we tend to get the right data for preparing the reports.need to work on the principle of SWOT analysis and see that the MIS information is generated for forward planning. The case is solveable and can be systematically approached by seeing that all the stated steps one by one are streamlined phasewise.

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