Category: Business

Having reached almost every country across the globe, the social and economic side-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic took root in national economies and businesses of all sizes, as seismic change, tumbling stock markets and rising unemployment necessitated a greater need for rapid response solutions across the globe.

Data from the period between October 2020 and January 2021 (against pre-pandemic levels) showed that a quarter of companies saw sales drop by 50%, although despite the initial impact, many firms managed to retain workers (around 65%) through reducing wages, hours or by granting leave, resulting in only 11% of companies laying off workers (Worldbank).

Opening Up

Partway through 2020, the Asia Foundation asked owners of MSMEs as to how they were able to navigate the pandemic while staying afloat. At the time, over half of all MSMEs in Thailand, Lao

PDR, Malaysia, and Timor-Leste had either shut down completely or were closed to customers, with Malaysian MSMEs being hit hardest (with just 5% of businesses running as “normal”).

With Malaysian COVID-19 cases still fluctuating, the country is now open for business, albeit tentatively. With disruption to travel still prevalent across the globe and a notable absence of overseas guests, Malaysia’s normally-flourishing hospitality industry has slowed considerably.

Staying Afloat

Other business types have fared better: at  the outset of the pandemic, micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) across South East Asia were relatively quick to respond. Representing between 97% and 99% of all firms and between 60% and 80% of total employment, smaller businesses were able to demonstrate a greater degree of resilience, flexibility and responsiveness, due in part to their size.

However, despite relative success in reducing public health risk throughout 2020, lockdowns had a major impact on households and small businesses alike. Many MSMES reported revenue losses of over 50% by comparison to levels prior to Covid. As with other brick and mortar outlets, low customer traffic led to closures (some permanently). Those which remained open received significantly reduced footfall, with additional limitations due to reduced pay and changes in working conditions.

Moving Forward

In response to the economic crisis, Southeast Asian governments responded by producing a series of programmes to support those most affected by the widespread disruption, including schemes offering financial support (primarily to small businesses). However, as the Asia Foundation reports, in hindsight these could have been optimized to be more effective.

KPMG outlines four stages on the path to recovery for businesses worldwide: the ability to react quickly, resilience, recovery plans and the capacity to adapt to a changing “new reality.” In addition to government support offering  tax-relief holidays and subsidies, lessons learned during previous waves can potentially be used to develop more effective future programmes.

Steps Towards Recovery

From a business perspective, there are three key ways to approach the current crisis. Firstly, a collaborative approach offers benefits to both parties,helping to increase both the reach and impact of two businesses working alongside each other.

Secondly, organizational agility is now viewed as essential to all businesses. Through formulating contingency plans and by preparing to deal with unknowns, businesses are better equipped to steel themselves against further closures. Finally, digitalization can be an effective way to create additional flexibility, though it is not by any means  a complete solution in and of itself.

If you are considering a career shift towards a role in the business sector, studying an MBA Online in your chosen business specialty field can help guide you towards the job you want.

International business is so much more involved and politically charged than it was even a decade ago. The need for a unique set of soft skills to help you navigate the international scene has become essential. While you still need to be an efficient negotiator and have analytical skills, the more subtle skill set will make a difference to your success. 

To remain competitive on the international stage, new graduates must have critical soft skills to help them relate to their colleagues and clients. Corporate management is still looking for those that excel at the technical skills but are also interested in candidates that are proficient in networking, adaptive thinking, and collaboration.

With inclusive programs from MBA Discovery, future business associates will learn how to adapt to the changing world of business. Let’s take a look at a few of the crucial soft skills that will help you succeed in international business.

Cross-Cultural Communication

Thanks to the reach of the internet and the convenience of modern travel, companies are doing business across the world. Your role in any industry will include working within a diverse environment. Finding ways to communicate across cultural lines effectively is essential to your success. You will need to keep an open mind, respect differences, and have a high level of appreciation for different cultures, traditions, and religious beliefs. 

Networking Abilities

Developing a collaborative network outside of your home country is essential to success in today’s business world. When you have a strong international network, you are often afforded opportunities you would never have otherwise. Online platforms like Linked In make networking across the globe an easy task. Making lasting connections requires diplomacy, excellent listening skills, and mastering your elevator pitch to be sensitive to all cultures. 

Adaptive Thinking

To be an effective adaptive thinker, you must hone your skills, including tact, impulse control, and humility. Having the ability to think outside of the box can help you to thrive in any international environment. When things change quickly, adaptive thinkers can control their impulses and come forward with a thoughtful solution. 

Resilience

You need to be mentally tough and need to be able to bounce back from the long hours and regular travel that a career in international business demands. Changing time zones, long meetings, and late hours can take a toll. You need to build up your resiliency to be at your best with your international colleagues and clients. 

Emotional Intelligence

Becoming a self-aware and confident business person will help you in your international dealings. Being able to control your emotions in various tense and serious situations will gain you respect from your peers and customers. Strong empathetic skills, a listening ear, and flexibility are all critical aspects of emotional intelligence.

If you are entering the realm of international business, you need to up your game to succeed. Strengthening your soft skills, including your networking abilities, being an adaptive thinker, heightening your emotional intelligence, and increasing your resiliency can assist you in becoming a successful international businessperson. 

You’re ready to make some major moves in life that require the best credit report you can muster. Well, you now have decisions to make. To wit, you can try to shine up your credit yourself or you can hire a credit repair agency. But is credit repair good or bad? Let’s take a gander.

The Issue

It’s difficult to move forward with too many negative marks on your credit reports, so it’s understandable that you’d want them removed. However, what you need to know is that, if you have the time, patience, and persistence, there’s nothing a credit repair agency can do that you can’t. 

However, if the unfavorable items on your reports are accurate, they technically cannot be removed, and if you wait, they’ll fall off naturally in due time. Now, some companies can sometimes gum up the works to such an extent that the negative entry is extracted. However, this is a poor strategy and hardly ever works.

Let’s take a holistic look at credit repair.

Just What is Credit Repair?

At its essence, it’s hiring a credit repair organization to get info expunged from your credit reports. Most such firms tout themselves as being able to help you make unverifiable or incorrect info on your credit reports disappear. 

The real deal, though, is that most companies try to also get negative, albeit correct, data off your reports before they, at length, drop off by themselves. Check out lexington law reviews to see what’s said about that leading credit repair company.

How Do I Know I’m Getting a Legit Company?

That’s a good and proper question, since scams abound in this industry. There are bad actors out there who seek to take advantage of existing financial and emotional vulnerabilities of people like you. The good news is that you’re protected by the federal Credit Repair Organizations Act, which sets forth what credit repair agencies can and cannot do.

For example, such companies may not:

• Counsel you to make erroneous statements to the top credit reporting agencies: Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion.
• Suggest that you alter your identity to block the credit reporting agencies from linking you with what’s on your credit reports.
• Charge you up front, before they’ve performed services on your behalf.
• Guarantee that it can get info from your reports removed.

Likewise, credit repair outfits are required to disclose to you the following:

• You do have the right to, for free, dispute information in your credit report.
• You can file a lawsuit against it if it breaches the Credit Repair Organizations Act.
• While it will do its best to act reasonably to make sure the info on your reports is correct, mistakes are sometimes made.

How Much Does Credit Repair Cost?

It depends on the company, but credit repair companies generally either bill you at month’s end for services rendered during the past month or charge you per delete.

With the former, a kind of subscription service, you can expect to pay $50 or $100 monthly. Here, such companies are incentivized to keep you around for as long as possible. With the latter, “pay for delete,” the company doesn’t bill you until it gets an item removed.

So, is credit repair good or bad? The answer mostly depends on what you truly want. If you’re looking to have inaccurate or unverifiable information removed from your credit reports, but aren’t inclined to tackle the task yourself, then, sure, hire a firm. However, paying a company in hopes that, somehow, it can get adverse but accurate info removed is frankly a fool’s errand. If you can’t wait for the item to drop off by itself, perhaps you need a different financial strategy. 

The manufacturing industry is super dynamic and highly competitive. There is continuous stress on manufacturers to adopt newer ways of conducting their business.

To run a successful manufacturing business, owners must focus on achieving multiple parameters such as,

• Proper forecasting of customer needs
• Right control over inventory
• Efficient management of sales leads
• Zero wastage
• Optimised ROI

A cloud ERP solution like https://www.netsuite.com.au/portal/au/products/erp.shtml can handle manufacturing concerns efficiently. It can also aid in achieving the success parameters more effortlessly. Read on to find out how implementing a cloud ERP system can help your manufacturing business.

Enhanced Inventory Control

The ERP solution streamlines your supply chain and ensures customer demand is always met promptly. By using the supply chain management module, manufacturers can build optimised logistics strategies. With access to real-time data, there is greater accuracy in forecasting and lower inventory costs.

Improved Decision Making

The ERP solution represents a centralised view of all business operations. The central hub offers essential information about sales, customers, finances, labour management, etc. Stakeholders can make use of the data on a real-time basis to make an accurate decision. An ERP solution is the key to making perfect forecasting and budget plans.

Better Quality Management

Quality control is a critical aspect of any manufacturing process. The cloud ERP solution includes in-built features adhering to optimal quality standards. It improves process and product quality by maintaining related documents in the centralised hub. The documents include standards about manufacturing processes, audits, safety management, and employee training and management.

Better Data Storage

ERP systems eliminate the need for error-prone, redundant manual processes. With a sound ERP solution, your data is cleaned and processed efficiently. The data is then stored using the highest levels of security and privacy parameters.

Manufacturers can access the data from any location, using any device. The access controls are well-defined to ensure the optimal safety of data.

Optimised Customer Relationship Management

Manufacturing companies must stay connected to customers consistently and understand their impulses. The CRM module (customer relationship management) of the ERP solution ensures optimised customer satisfaction.

CRM improves customer response time. It helps the sales team to track and follow up with leads easily. It captures customer interactions from multiple sources and ensures that the customer is presented with the right product at the right time. 

Better Supplier Collaboration

The ERP system takes care of your supplier relationships too. With an enhanced internal communication system, your team is well-prepared to handle suppliers from any part of the world. ERP reduces response time, helps track down issues promptly, and aids in resolving the problems with proper damage control. 

Enhanced Revenue and Better Cost Control

An ERP solution can improve business revenue and help with cost reduction in multiple ways. Some of them are,

• Automation of tasks leads to lowered labour costs.
• Unlocking newer revenue streams by helping the business go digital.
• Optimised inventory management that cuts down operating and administrative costs.
• Better control over the quality of products makes business growth inevitable.

Cloud ERP System versus In-House Deployment

Some manufacturers believe that an in-house ERP system offers better control over their data and operations. This is, however, not true, and the cloud ERP solution is always the winner. Here are some of the critical benefits of a cloud system.

1. Automatic upgrades
2. Access to real-time data from any place and any device
3. Lowered costs
4. Saves more time
5. A cloud-based solution is easily scalable
6. Shorter deployment times

However, you cannot achieve the multiple benefits of an ERP system for manufacturing companies by simply deploying any software solution.

A trusted solution ensures 100% profitability and business growth.  Explore the critical modules of ERP solutions and find out the different ways it can help your business grow.

Commodity trading is a bit different than currency trading. The new currency traders often think that they can trade the commodity market without gaining special knowledge about the industry. But doing so, they are making a big mistake. If you want to become a top commodity trader, you should follow some specific guidelines. Most importantly, you need to have a strong mindset that you will learn new things.

Learning new things regarding trading business is a very tough task. But if you take rational steps it won’t take much to become a profitable trader. Let’s see the key steps which we can follow to become a top commodity trader.

Develop a strong basic

Commodity trading requires strong basic. Without having sound knowledge about the supply and demand zone, it is nearly impossible to find the perfect trading opportunity. You might be thinking that you know everything about this market and easily make a big profit without doing the proper market analysis. But this not the way professional traders execute their trades. They rely on fixed sets of logic and execute the trades after doing the in-depth market analysis. So, start working hard and learning the basics of trading.

Find a good broker

Without gaining access to a robust trading platform, you won’t be able to do the perfect market analysis. Most retail traders think that they know everything about the market and they don’t have to trade with the high-end brokers. But after taking the trades with the low-end platforms, they start to look for the best commodity broker. By choosing a good broker, you can avoid many technical problems, and thus you will be able to make better decisions. Never try to ignore the importance of a well-reputed broker. If you do so, you will keep on losing money and eventually blame the market.

Learn to analyze price action signals

To trade the commodity market, you should learn to deal with the price action confirmation signals. Once you master the art of price action trading strategy, you should be able to take the trades in a standard way. This will improve your decision-making skills. Usually, the traders execute the trades at the important support and resistance level without taking any confirmation. But if you do the math properly, you will notice the support and resistance level are often broken. And the false spikes can easily hunt down the stop loss. To avoid such problems, we can rely on the price action confirmation signals and execute the trades without having any major problems.

Learn about the chart pattern

Professional commodity traders are very good at analyzing the major chart. Learn about the major chart pattern so that you can execute the quality trades without having any major issues. Forget about the aggressive approach and look for reliable trade signals based on the chart pattern. Though it will be tough to take the trades you do have the option to use the paper trading account. At the initial stage, start learning about the continuation chart pattern as it will make the overall trading process easier. And if you take the trades with the help of a reversal chart pattern, you should look for the price action confirmation signals.

Trade with low risk

To survive in the commodity market, you must know the fact, losing trades are very common. If you try to ignore the losing trades, you are going to lose money most of the time. So, to protect your trading capital, you should stick to the basic 2% rule of money management. At times you might have the urge to trade with higher risk but you must control this greed. Unless you systematically control your greed factor, you will keep on losing money and eventually blame the market. That’s why always follow standard rules at trading and take the trades with discipline.

It may shock you to learn just how much your past financial mistakes can impact your future purchasing decisions. Even a late or non-payment could end up costing you several thousand dollars due to lending institutions and banks seeing you as a high-risk borrower.

While you can’t turn back the clock, you may be able to improve your financial situation in a straightforward way – by purchasing seasoned tradelines. The following information may enlighten you as to how.

Wider Job Prospects

Surprisingly, authorized user tradelines might be able to make you a more desirable employee on paper for businesses looking to hire you. Many companies look at the payment history and credit reports of people they are considering hiring.

While your non-payment on a TV doesn’t make you a bad person, employers can see it as a reflection of how responsible you are. Improving your credit score with AU tradelines may make a difference to your job prospects in the future.

More Loan and Credit Card Options

Some people fear applying for loans and credit cards because they believe their poor credit history will have them turned down. If you do apply, your credit score may even mean you’re not eligible for some of the more competitive interest rates that may be available.

With a seasoned tradeline of a suitable age and credit limit, that may change. A tradeline may be able to boost your credit score and make you eligible for better interest rates that make everyday living more affordable.

Better Mortgage Options

Even if you’ve done everything in your power to reduce debt to improve your chances of mortgage approval, your credit score may still work against you. Many lenders see a low credit score and associate it with poor money management. You may then be seen as a high-risk borrower and have to pay higher interest rates as a result.

In many situations, purchasing a tradeline can assist with broadening your mortgage options. The higher your score, the more lenders may be lining up to offer you competitive mortgage lending rates.

Pay Less on Vehicle Insurance

Vehicle insurance companies have made an unusual discovery. People with lower credit scores may file more claims. As they are in the business of making money, they often charge those people higher rates. You may be able to save money on your monthly payments by improving your credit score.

Improved Rental Possibilities

Finding the perfect property to rent for your family can be challenging with the best credit score. However, it’s often even more so with a patchy financial history.

Many landlords and property managers screen tenants and view their credit scores to determine how safe or risky they are as a tenant. Even if you’ve only had one blemish on your record, it can be all it takes for a property investor to decide to choose someone else.

At least 90 days before you start your search for a new rental property, consider purchasing an authorized user tradeline. By the time prospective landlords start running checks on you, your credit score may already be improved.

There are plenty of ways to improve your financial situation, such as getting a higher-paying job and cutting your costs. However, in the long-term, purchasing tradelines may also be among the best. If you’re in any of these situations above, it may be worth looking at your options.