Training and development and skill inventory:

Fundamental to the delivery of any path project is the development of the team and the professional development of all individuals.

Training and Development is an educational process- ‘the process of bringing a person to an agreed standard of skill by practice and instruction’.

Effective trainings can develop skills and behaviors that can be transferred back to the workplace.

when setting any objectives for  ‘The Training Cycle’ we should be using the standard management practice of using SMART objectives.

S	we will notice that the above objectives are specific in that they explain a number of individual tasks.
M	They are measurable in that we can determine if the tasks have been completed by checking against the targets, e.g. 2000 words, four bridges, grid reference, and so on.
A	They are achievable in that resources are available to complete the project. For example, is there sufficient time for completion and does the candidate have access to a computer?
R	They should be realistic. Clearly projects have to be set at an appropriate level and be relevant to the development of the individual. We have to ask whether the person presently has the skills to carry out the project, does he/she need training or can they learn by completing the project?
T	Finally, the project should be time-bound in that we have to set time targets for completion, and possibly for reviewing progress.

If we are able to set SMART objectives it makes the job of evaluation and review much easier.

Identify the need

The need for staff training can be identified in a number of ways, such as during interviews, through feedback from colleagues, by competence or knowledge tests, by observing work taking place, or from appraisal documents or CVs. Skills and knowledge audits and a SWOT analyses are well-known techniques that can be used for self-assessment as well as for identifying the needs of individuals and groups.

Training can: -

●      _ increase people’s confidence

●      _ confirm to people the value of what they are already doing

●      _ enable people to pass on new skills to colleagues in the workplace

●      _ raise general awareness

●      _ change people’s attitudes

●      _ improve morale

Skills Inventory:

A skills inventory is a compilation of the skills, education and experiences of current employees. Organizations use these inventories to assess their ability to meet certain company goals. Understanding the company’s pool of current skills/talents and its future skill requirements can aid an organization in its strategic planning efforts.

i.e. Listing of abilities, capacities, qualifications, and career goals of the employees to identify suitable candidates for internal recruitment or promotions.

It can include: -

●      skills,

●      talents,

●      knowledge,

●      Attributes (like motivation, and confidence).

Benefits of an Employee Skills Inventory: -

●      Collect skills in real-time.

●      Report results immediately with our robust, online diagnostic platform.

●      Gain a comprehensive view of the current skill base for the entire organization.

●      Locate specific skills by geography, division, or many other useful demographics.

●      Identify strengths that correlate with organizational success.

●      Isolate skill gaps and build targeted training programs.

●      Prioritize skills needed in critical strategic areas to meet business requirements.

●      Create a searchable directory of skills to be used throughout the organization for team building and succession planning.

●      Create a community of practice for technical resources across the globe.

●      Give employees an opportunity to voice their skills, talents and interests.

●      Match job descriptions with employees’ skill sets for better employee satisfaction and productivity.

Four Essential Components for Skills Inventory Management:-

1. A Well-defined Classification System:

An objective system must rely on an established list of predefined skills and an agreed-upon set of criteria by which to measure them.

2. A Consistent Unit of Measure

3. An Efficient Measurement Process

4. A Practical Tracking and Reporting System

●      Skills tracking:  “The skill tracking system helps us get the right talent at the right time and engage existing employees appropriately. Employee-skill inventory also helps in designing customized training and development programmes.

●      Skills mapping: the process of giving the employees feedback on their skill sets.. “An assessment exercise helps to measure the “as-is” status of the employee and provide a structured feedback on the strengths and the weaknesses. Based on this feedback, the employees are provided a learning environment where they can pick up specific topics and improve their understanding of these topics.

Human Resource Development (HRD) 

●      Human Resource Development (HRD) is the framework for helping employees develop their personal and organizational skills, knowledge, and abilities.

●      It can be defined as a set of planned and systematic activities designed by an organization to provide its members with the opportunities to learn necessary skills to meet current and future job demands

●      HRD is used in three critical application areas:

○     Training and development,,

○     career development,

○     quality improvement

■    Organization development is the process of systematically implementing organizational change with a goal of performance.

■    Training and development is then the process of systematically developing expertise in individuals also with the aim to improve performance

●      Various Human Resource Management factors to be taken care of:-

●      Employee Benefits	●      Hiring and recruiting
●      Careers	●      Workforce management
●      Compensation	●      Employee development
●      Workplace Health and Safety

●      These factors Further from the folder .. 

Production Finance     

For any firm the major source of revenue is through sales of products. Even before fixing the price of a product it is necessary to determine the cost incurred in producing the product. The cost of a product depends upon the pattern of production. In production Finance we include:

(1) Product Costing Methods
(2) Cost Control
(3) Cost reduction

●      Product Costing Methods:

There are two methods of product costing

1.       Job order costing

2.       Process costing

Job order costing method is also known as specific order costing and production order costing.. The job order costing method is used where the production is strictly according to the customers’ orders. Each job is separate and independent with each other. This method determines costs for each job separately.

for example, in a ship building industry each ship is made according to the specifications (as capacity of the ship, number of cabins etc) of the customers. The order placed by another customer for a ship may not be according to the earlier order specifications and the cost of a ship differs from order to order. Thus, in the order costing the cost of a product is determined, based on the customers’ orders.

In job costing, the quantity of production is small and unit costs are relatively high.

Process costing is used in industries which are in mass production. Process costing involves large quantity of homogeneous product with relatively low unit cost. This method determines the cost per unit of product manufactured where identical units of a product are manufactured for all the customers. For example, a customer placed an order for 500 kg of nails. Usually the process of making nail involves (a) cutting the length of rod to the nail size (b) making head at one end and to sharpen the other end. Estimating the cost of each nail is not a feasible method. According to the process costing method the process cost of each department, in which the process takes place, will be accumulated and the costs of each department will be added to determine the total cost of production. This total cost of the production is linked to the total units produced during period and the unit cost of a product can be determined.

One of the primary objectives of an organization is to earn the maximum possible profits by providing products and services of expected quality to its customers. A firm can earn higher profits either by increasing the selling price or by reducing the manufacturing costs while the former one is not advisable in the competitive markets. Thus, the only alternative is reduction of the manufacturing costs which is achieved through cost control and cost reduction.

●      Cost Control:

Cost control can be achieved through,

(1) Decision control
(2) Operational control

Decision Controls and Operational Controls:

Decision control mainly includes decision to make or decision to buy. Because some times firms may earn higher profits by buying a part of equipment or a component or by giving a subcontract instead of producing it. For example, let us consider the example discussed in the job costing, shipping industry. In the process of making a ship, a firm needs nuts and bolts. Here the firm has to decide whether to produce the nuts and bolts or to buy these from the market or to give sub-contract to make these components. Here one has the market or to give sub-contract to make these components. Here one has to evaluate the advantage and disadvantage of each option and has to make a decision.

An operational control is concerned with the extent to which the expected level of performance to be achieved in the implementation phase of any decision.

In any organization the effective way of implementing cost control is by responsible accounting in the organization. For this it is necessary to categorize the costs as costs control by me (or of department) and costs controllable by others.

Once the controllable cost of each department is identified, the actual costs of a department are compared with the expected or estimated costs and proper actions will be initiated wherever necessary.

●      Cost reduction:

Actual costs are costs incurred because of operations to produce a product

Standard costs are estimated costs and these costs act as benchmark which is compared with the actual costs and this helps in evaluating performance.

Cost control involves ensuring the actual costs incurred are in accordance with the standard costs. Whereas, cost reduction involves revising of the standard costs with the objective of reducing the cost of a product without affecting the quality or performance of the product in the end use for which it is intended. The cost reduction can be achieved by systematic examination of the operations involved in the process and

1) by eliminating unnecessary operations
2) by rearranging the sequence of operations
3) by modifying the process of operation
4) by eliminating the unnecessary movements of men and material
5) by minimizing the material wastage in the process of operation.

Examples:-

Cost Control: - E.g. You are allowed to hire anybody up to a salary of $X.
Cost reduction: - E.g. You must reduce everybody's salary by 5% .

Cyber Cash Model : 

Basic:- To take advantage of the Internet with a complete E-Commerce solution, a merchant's website must be able to accept and process secure online payments. In order to take credit card payments online, merchants need to have an Internet Payment Service and a Merchant Credit Card Account.

1. The Internet Payment Service, such as CyberCash, enables the merchant to accept online payments from their customers and securely processes these payments from a Merchant's Web storefront through the existing system of financial institutions and credit card processors

2. The Merchant's financial institution provides the merchant with a bank account that enables them to accept, process, and deposit payments from their customers, and delivers regular reporting based on these transactions

CyberCash / CyberCoin : CyberCash’s Secure Internet Service delivers a safe, real-time solution for merchant processing of  payments over the Internet. It accepts both credit card payments and cash/coin transactions. The Credit Card Service lets any consumer buy from any ‘CyberCash enabled merchant’.

CyberCash is a system that allows customers to pay by a credit card without revealing the credit card number to the merchant. To achieve this, a credit card number is sent to the merchant in an encrypted form.

Designed to integrate fully with existing transaction processing systems used by banks and other financial institutions, the service provides automated and instantaneous authentication, enabling order processing to traverse the Internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Consumers Benefits:

●      Safe, private and easy to use. Protected by the highest allowed levels of Internet encryption with assured authentication.

●      Use existing Visa, MasterCard, American Express or Discover. No special credit cards are necessary.

●      Complete on-line payments

Merchant Benefits:

●      Real-time authorization and settlement

●      Receive payments instantly and secure

●      No need to maintain expensive phone or fax operations

●      Open 24 hours a day

Note: CyberCash is a system which uses public-key cryptography to leverage credit cards onto the Internet, and CyberCoin is an extension of CyberCash to allow small-value transactions.

How? CyberCash gives customers a “digital Wallet”. The consumer downloads the CyberCash digital wallet software, and enrolls their credit card with the wallet, and with CyberCash; they may also open a CyberCoin account and move some money into it.

When the consumer approves a transaction, an encrypted payment order is sent to the merchant, who adds some payment information, signs the order, and forwards it to the CyberCash gateway. The merchant never sees the consumer's credit card number.

In Detail:

●      When the purchase was initiated, the CyberCash wallet displayed the amount, the merchant's name, and other information. Then the customer completes the purchase by clicking on the cyber cash PAY button of a merchant’s World Wide Web site, an encrypted payment order was sent to the merchant.

●      The merchant’s CyberCash software verifies that neither the order nor the ‘encrypted payment information’ have been modified during transmission. The merchant could decrypt some of the information in the order, such as the product list, the address, etc., but not the other (such as the credit card information). Then merchant's software would add its own payment information to the order, digitally sign it, and then send it to the CyberCash gateway.

●      The CyberCash gateway verifies that no modification have been made to it during transmit and would decrypt the information. The order would be checked for duplicate requests. The gateway would verify that the customer's and the merchant's order information match (i.e. no fraud was committed on either side). Then it would perform the money transfer and send the approval message to the merchant.

Once approval is received by the merchant’s server it notifies the customer. The whole process; from the customer initiating the payment to getting approval, takes less than 20 seconds.

The digital wallet initially supported only credit cards, but now also does ‘small dollar amounts’ for products and services that are too expensive to justify using a credit card. Cyber coin money is placed in to an account at cyber cash and as while making cyber coin transactions money is pulled out from your wallet and sent to the cyber coin merchant’s wallet. In a sense cyber cash process electronically presents your credit card payments to the merchant in the process just like the last time we physically pulled the card out of our wallet and presented it to a merchant.

CyberCash's CashRegister System:- Firstly CyberCash's CashRegister software is needed that offers three methods for authorizing consumer purchases and actually billing the consumer's credit card: online capturing, post-authorization capturing, and batch capturing.

[Basic of Classification: The processing method a merchant uses is dictated by how products are delivered to consumers. Merchants selling products or services that are being delivered online or that are guaranteed to ship the same day will use online capturing. On the other hand, because of mail order laws, merchants selling products that are shipped after the order is taken may choose post-authorization capturing or batch capturing. ]

Classifying the 3 methods for customer purchase authorization:

●      Online Capture: here transactions are captured and charged to the consumer's credit card as soon as they are authorized. This method is appropriate for merchants selling on-line services, information, or software that is being delivered immediately to the consumer over the Internet. It also appropriate for merchants who can guarantee shipment of material goods on the same day that they are ordered.

●      Post-Authorization Capture: With post-authorization capturing, the merchant uses CashRegister's administrative server to capture individual transactions using a post-authorization message that is sent to the processing bank. This message tells the bank to capture the transaction and charge the transaction to the consumer's credit card. This method is appropriate for merchants shipping merchandise more than a day after the consumer has ordered it.

●      Batch Capture: Batch capturing is a variant of post-authorization capturing. The merchant uses the CashRegister administrative server to capture transactions using a batch capture model where the merchant saves up the authorizations and submits them in a batch to the processing bank. The batch data contains all of the authorized transactions that the bank needs to reconcile your merchant account and transfer funds. If a merchant is processing a lot of orders, this procedure is probably more efficient than using post-authorization capture for each transaction. 

FIRST VIRTUAL: Internet Payment System

First Virtual was one of the first Internet payment systems to be available to the public, announced as a fully operational open Internet service in 1994 and “First Virtual Holdings” was the company to facilitate this first Internet commerce service.

This is a very elegant, well conceived, low-tech system, built on top of the Credit Card infrastructure. It avoids card numbers ever being sent over the Internet or disclosed to merchants, and it allows the purchaser to confirm the payment. The purchaser must be reachable by e-mail. Amazingly, it uses no encryption.

How?  The customer gives their card number to the First Virtual Bank by phoning up a particular number and typing it into a touch phone. In return they are assigned a PIN password. The merchant must be registered with First Virtual, and must have a bank account able to accept payments by the ACH (Automated Clearing House) system; that is to say, a U.S. bank account.

When the customer makes an order, they give the merchant their PIN password. The merchant then contacts First Virtual, quotes them the PIN and asks for the money. First Virtual send the customer an e-mail asking for their OK. The customer replies either "Yes", "No" or "Fraud", and if the reply is "Yes" the transaction goes through.

Start-up objectives of First Virtual Payment System:-

1.        Focus on Internet Information Commerce. What we here call Virtual Goods Commerce.

2.        Never exchange or keep financial information on the Internet.

●      This makes it very hard for hackers to steal any info.

●      There is simply no access path from the Internet to this data.

3.         Provide Security, but do not use cryptography.

 FV security was provided with other means. Namely, it is very hard to

intercept Email addressed to an individual, and then prevent it from also

being delivered to the addressed recipient and then fake a reply to FV

saying "YES", which the FV PIN holder never sees.

FV never had a case of receiving a false Yes..

4.        No Special Software required. Buyers just use regular browsers and Email.

●      This was a general result of avoiding complexity of use.

5.        Worked with the available WEB, FTP, and Email system and tools.

●      The KISS Principle: "Keep It Simple, Stupid"

6.       High degree of privacy.

●      Sellers should not need to know the buyer's personal information, other than the buyer's "Virtual PIN" account identifier.

●      However, some FV employees had access to user's data, and FV kept histories of user behavior to control rampant non-payment.

Assumptions based on 3 fundamental assumptions.

●      First, electronic information merchants can produce as many or few copies of any information product at no incremental cost per copy because once the information has been developed and offered for sale once, the cost of selling it again is virtually zero.

●      Second, information-buyers like buyers of any other product need some way to examine products before they buy.

●      Finally, buying and selling should be simple and have as low an entry cost in time, money and effort as possible.

These assumptions lead to certain conclusions, which produce a different view of the information marketplace than that taken by most other commerce providers:

1.  Because there is no cost or negligible cost associated with sending out a copy of the information being sold, “returns” or “stolen goods” don’t in fact cost the merchant anything.

2. Information products are sold “on approval” with the customer required to explicitly reply either yes or no to a request for payment, but only after having received a copy of the information.

3. Information products can be sold through virtually any Internet application and do not require vendors or buyers to buy special software. More important, first virtual offers facilities to individuals to sell information online for very minimal cost

 The First Virtual payment system has several advantages and disadvantages over other payment systems used on the Internet.

Advantages:

●      Neither buyer or seller needs to install any software in order to use the system.

●      Buyers are virtually 100 % protected from fraud. No charges are processed against their account without their confirmation.

●      Purchases are essentially anonymous. The merchant is never given the buyer's name from First Virtual.

●      It is extremely easy to become a merchant, or seller, under First Virtual. First Virtual does not screen merchants, nor do they require merchants to have a special business accounts established with a bank. All a person needs to sell merchandise, services, data, etc.. over the Internet is an ordinary checking account.

●      First Virtual has very low processing fees compared to other Internet payment schemes or even straight credit card processing.

Disadvantages:

●      Merchant assumes all risk!

●      Extremely long waiting period between when a sale is made and when payment is deposited in the merchant's account.