It time for the search of real online business! Many people claim that its easy to make money online if you follow the so called proven system. There are actually no statistics of any proven system that we could decide on. It is almost a chain of reactions that takes place and it circulates within the Internet world from people to people.But, believe that making money online is though not easy, but a possible one. When we plan to start a business on online with or without investment, we definitely start from somewhere. There are no automated systems that could generate $$$$ with out having to spend time or energy.We don’t have to spend for any marketing in the Internet, but spending money sometimes may increase our income.If we feel that we are not going to spend for this, then we are planning for a long term target and we will have to rely only on our hard work and unlimited time.There will be several failures and disappointment doing business online. We may feel that nothing is reliable, the process is too complicated, each one is linked with another so it goes on and on, never ending!! But remember that if a person tells that he is making profit means that he is making profit. We read his column somewhere in the web that itself is a profit of success to him. Hence always remember that success is following us when we fail.Marketing is the ultimate aim of Internet business. What ever business we do, we should have customers, clients, readers, commentators etc, We need people to visit our business, express their opinion, add suggestions on further improvement etc. So, attracting people is the main task of marketing.We may have to adapt several methods and techniques by trial and error method as all standard marketing practise may not yield the same positive results each time.There are some advantages as well as disadvantages of starting online business. First let us see the advantages.Opportunities are everywhere in the Internet world. Since the reach of the Internet is far beyond our imagination, this can bring audience from anywhere in the world. The Internet network and the viewers are ever growing so there are no bound for the business limitations. We can work on our own time, flexible working hours and at leisure. We can spend more time on other activities as the Internet business once established would give you lot of free time. Any online training, research or studies is much cheaper compared to the conventional ones, most of the references are available free of cost. It is indeed thrilling to surf and work online as we will be stunned to see the scope for so many businesses on line. We can start business with very low capital and also chances of multiple stream of income at the same time.The disadvantages are initially we will have to spend too much time to know, understand and establish what we really want to do. There are lots of research work needed. Internet philosophy is far beyond our understanding the reason that what is hot topic today may not even be talked tomorrow. So we should always be ready to accept and adapt to regular changes. Too many HYPE in the Internet marketing may mislead us in selecting our business and going right way. Selecting Internet business would not yield overnight profit as we dream of. Be practical and accept the fact that our web page one in billion and chances of people visiting and business is also in the same probability. There are more chances of jumping from one opportunity to another and that will definitely not help us to grow in the Internet business.Well, there is a question how much we can earn a day in Internet business? It all depends on our adaptability, skills, ability to learn, hard work and intelligence. It may take a lot of time initially to start earning through Internet business, there will be a quite lot of testing times before we enter into the right one. All depends on how we sell ourselves in the world of Internet business. Marketing, as i mentioned earlier, is a vital aspect of the business, We should select the right ways of marketing. There are some faster ways of marketing also, but that may not always suit our business.More importantly we as the online business owner need to be aware of spam, the practise of sending unsolicited, untargeted mass commercial messages. There are some serious consequences of spamming, including suspension or termination by our web host, affiliate programs etc. as spamming is a very poor business practise.There are plenty of legitimate ways available to market our business instead of spammingShould we spend invest money for starting online business? We may or may not spend and that depends totally on how we want to go about marketing our business. There are quite a lot of ways to start and continue online business free of cost. The main part of expenditure is for marketing. If we start the online business as a writer, then, the cost of marketing is less compared to other online business. As a writer we only need to search the right publishing sites that pays for our articles. These are available in the free web directories, we can find through search engines etc.There are some paid membership sites also that saves lot of our time rather than going to the web directories to search for. What we can earn by writing articles again depends on the selection of topic, method of writing, how quick we are and how relevant the subject is.There are several other online businesses that need to bring in the traffic to our website in order to generate revenue. Many sites claim that they can get us loads of traffic, but always prefer to get the targeted traffic that would benefit out site and our business.
Best in Class Finance Functions For Police Forces
Background
Police funding has risen by £4.8 billion and 77 per cent (39 per cent in real terms) since 1997. However the days where forces have enjoyed such levels of funding are over.
Chief Constables and senior management recognize that the annual cycle of looking for efficiencies year-on-year is not sustainable, and will not address the cash shortfall in years to come.
Facing slower funding growth and real cash deficits in their budgets, the Police Service must adopt innovative strategies which generate the productivity and efficiency gains needed to deliver high quality policing to the public.
The step-change in performance required to meet this challenge will only be achieved if the police service fully embraces effective resource management and makes efficient and productive use of its technology, partnerships and people.
The finance function has an essential role to play in addressing these challenges and supporting Forces’ objectives economically and efficiently.
Challenge
Police Forces tend to nurture a divisional and departmental culture rather than a corporate one, with individual procurement activities that do not exploit economies of scale. This is in part the result of over a decade of devolving functions from the center to the.divisions.
In order to reduce costs, improve efficiency and mitigate against the threat of “top down” mandatory, centrally-driven initiatives, Police Forces need to set up a corporate back office and induce behavioral change. This change must involve compliance with a corporate culture rather than a series of silos running through the organization.
Developing a Best in Class Finance Function
Traditionally finance functions within Police Forces have focused on transactional processing with only limited support for management information and business decision support. With a renewed focus on efficiencies, there is now a pressing need for finance departments to transform in order to add greater value to the force but with minimal costs.
1) Aligning to Force Strategy
As Police Forces need finance to function, it is imperative that finance and operations are closely aligned. This collaboration can be very powerful and help deliver significant improvements to a Force, but in order to achieve this model, there are many barriers to overcome. Finance Directors must look at whether their Force is ready for this collaboration, but more importantly, they must consider whether the Force itself can survive without it.
Finance requires a clear vision that centers around its role as a balanced business partner. However to achieve this vision a huge effort is required from the bottom up to understand the significant complexity in underlying systems and processes and to devise a way forward that can work for that particular organization.
The success of any change management program is dependent on its execution. Change is difficult and costly to execute correctly, and often, Police Forces lack the relevant experience to achieve such change. Although finance directors are required to hold appropriate professional qualifications (as opposed to being former police officers as was the case a few years ago) many have progressed within the Public Sector with limited opportunities for learning from and interaction with best in class methodologies. In addition cultural issues around self-preservation can present barriers to change.
Whilst it is relatively easy to get the message of finance transformation across, securing commitment to embark on bold change can be tough. Business cases often lack the quality required to drive through change and even where they are of exceptional quality senior police officers often lack the commercial awareness to trust them.
2) Supporting Force Decisions
Many Finance Directors are keen to develop their finance functions. The challenge they face is convincing the rest of the Force that the finance function can add value – by devoting more time and effort to financial analysis and providing senior management with the tools to understand the financial implications of major strategic decisions.
Maintaining Financial Controls and Managing Risk
Sarbanes Oxley, International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), Basel II and Individual Capital Assessments (ICA) have all put financial controls and reporting under the spotlight in the private sector. This in turn is increasing the spotlight on financial controls in the public sector.
A ‘Best in Class’ Police Force finance function will not just have the minimum controls to meet the regulatory requirements but will evaluate how the legislation and regulations that the finance function are required to comply with, can be leveraged to provide value to the organization. Providing strategic information that will enable the force to meet its objectives is a key task for a leading finance function.
3) Value to the Force
The drive for development over the last decade or so, has moved decision making to the Divisions and has led to an increase in costs in the finance function. Through utilizing a number of initiatives in a program of transformation, a Force can leverage up to 40% of savings on the cost of finance together with improving the responsiveness of finance teams and the quality of financial information. These initiatives include:
Centralization
By centralizing the finance function, a Police Force can create centers of excellence where industry best practice can be developed and shared. This will not only re-empower the department, creating greater independence and objectivity in assessing projects and performance, but also lead to more consistent management information and a higher degree of control. A Police Force can also develop a business partner group to act as strategic liaisons to departments and divisions. The business partners would, for example, advise on how the departmental and divisional commanders can meet the budget in future months instead of merely advising that the budget has been missed for the previous month.
With the mundane number crunching being performed in a shared service center, finance professionals will find they now have time to act as business partners to divisions and departments and focus on the strategic issues.
The cultural impact on the departments and divisional commanders should not be underestimated. Commanders will be concerned that:
o Their budgets will be centralized
o Workloads would increase
o There will be limited access to finance individuals
o There will not be on site support
However, if the centralized shared service center is designed appropriately none of the above should apply. In fact from centralization under a best practice model, leaders should accrue the following benefits:
o Strategic advice provided by business partners
o Increased flexibility
o Improved management information
o Faster transactions
o Reduced number of unresolved queries
o Greater clarity on service and cost of provision
o Forum for finance to be strategically aligned to the needs of the Force
A Force that moves from a de-centralized to a centralized system should try and ensure that the finance function does not lose touch with the Chief Constable and Divisional Commanders. Forces need to have a robust business case for finance transformation combined with a governance structure that spans operational, tactical and strategic requirements. There is a risk that potential benefits of implementing such a change may not be realized if the program is not carefully managed. Investment is needed to create a successful centralized finance function. Typically the future potential benefits of greater visibility and control, consistent processes, standardized management information, economies of scale, long-term cost savings and an empowered group of proud finance professionals, should outweigh those initial costs.
To reduce the commercial, operational and capability risks, the finance functions can be completely outsourced or partially outsourced to third parties. This will provide guaranteed cost benefits and may provide the opportunity to leverage relationships with vendors that provide best practice processes.
Process Efficiencies
Typically for Police Forces the focus on development has developed a silo based culture with disparate processes. As a result significant opportunities exist for standardization and simplification of processes which provide scalability, reduce manual effort and deliver business benefit. From simply rationalizing processes, a force can typically accrue a 40% reduction in the number of processes. An example of this is the use of electronic bank statements instead of using the manual bank statement for bank reconciliation and accounts receivable processes. This would save considerable effort that is involved in analyzing the data, moving the data onto different spreadsheet and inputting the data into the financial systems.
Organizations that possess a silo operating model tend to have significant inefficiencies and duplication in their processes, for example in HR and Payroll. This is largely due to the teams involved meeting their own goals but not aligning to the corporate objectives of an organization. Police Forces have a number of independent teams that are reliant on one another for data with finance in departments, divisions and headquarters sending and receiving information from each other as well as from the rest of the Force. The silo model leads to ineffective data being received by the teams that then have to carry out additional work to obtain the information required.
Whilst the argument for development has been well made in the context of moving decision making closer to operational service delivery, the added cost in terms of resources, duplication and misaligned processes has rarely featured in the debate. In the current financial climate these costs need to be recognized.
Culture
Within transactional processes, a leading finance function will set up targets for staff members on a daily basis. This target setting is an element of the metric based culture that leading finance functions develop. If the appropriate metrics of productivity and quality are applied and when these targets are challenging but not impossible, this is proven to result in improvements to productivity and quality.
A ‘Best in Class’ finance function in Police Forces will have a service focused culture, with the primary objectives of providing a high level of satisfaction for its customers (departments, divisions, employees & suppliers). A ‘Best in Class’ finance function will measure customer satisfaction on a timely basis through a metric based approach. This will be combined with a team wide focus on process improvement, with process owners, that will not necessarily be the team leads, owning force-wide improvement to each of the finance processes.
Organizational Improvements
Organizational structures within Police Forces are typically made up of supervisors leading teams of one to four team members. Through centralizing and consolidating the finance function, an opportunity exists to increase the span of control to best practice levels of 6 to 8 team members to one team lead / supervisor. By adjusting the organizational structure and increasing the span of control, Police Forces can accrue significant cashable benefit from a reduction in the number of team leads and team leads can accrue better management experience from managing larger teams.
Technology Enabled Improvements
There are a significant number of technology improvements that a Police Force could implement to help develop a ‘Best in Class’ finance function.
These include:
A) Scanning and workflow
Through adopting a scanning and workflow solution to replace manual processes, improved visibility, transparency and efficiencies can be reaped.
B) Call logging, tracking and workflow tool
Police Forces generally have a number of individuals responding to internal and supplier queries. These queries are neither logged nor tracked. The consequence of this is dual:
o Queries consume considerable effort within a particular finance team. There is a high risk of duplicated effort from the lack of logging of queries. For example, a query could be responded to for 30 minutes by person A in the finance team. Due to this query not being logged, if the individual that raised the query called up again and spoke to a different person then just for one additional question, this could take up to 20 minutes to ensure that the background was appropriately explained.
o Queries can have numerous interfaces with the business. An unresolved query can be responded against by up to four separate teams with considerable delay in providing a clear answer for the supplier.
The implementation of a call logging, tracking and workflow tool to document, measure and close internal and supplier queries combined with the set up of a central queries team, would significantly reduce the effort involved in responding to queries within the finance departments and divisions, as well as within the actual divisions and departments, and procurement.
C) Database solution
Throughout finance departments there are a significant number of spreadsheets utilized prior to input into the financial system. There is a tendency to transfer information manually from one spreadsheet to another to meet the needs of different teams.
Replacing the spreadsheets with a database solution would rationalize the number of inputs and lead to effort savings for the front line Police Officers as well as Police Staff.
D) Customize reports
In obtaining management information from the financial systems, police staff run a series of reports, import these into excel, use lookups to match the data and implement pivots to illustrate the data as required. There is significant manual effort that is involved in carrying out this work. Through customizing reports the outputs from the financial system can be set up to provide the data in the formats required through the click of a button. This would have the benefit of reduced effort and improved motivation for team members that previously carried out these mundane tasks.
In designing, procuring and implementing new technology enabling tools, a Police Force will face a number of challenges including investment approval; IT capacity; capability; and procurement.
These challenges can be mitigated through partnering with a third party service company with whom the investment can be shared, the skills can be provided and the procurement cycle can be minimized.
Conclusion
It is clear that cultural, process and technology change is required if police forces are to deliver both sustainable efficiencies and high quality services. In an environment where for the first time forces face real cash deficits and face having to reduce police officer and support staff numbers whilst maintaining current performance levels the current finance delivery models requires new thinking.
While there a number of barriers to be overcome in achieving a best in class finance function, it won’t be long before such a decision becomes mandatory. Those who are ahead of the curve will inevitably find themselves in a stronger position.
Exposing the Dirty Truth Behind “Sensitive Skin Care Products”
Do you have sensitive skin and spend your time searching for solutions? Are you always looking for great sensitive skin care products? Lets see exactly what sensitive skin is and what you can do when faced with selecting anti aging products for your skin.Of course there are always people with specific skin conditions. There are clear skin conditions that require the care of a dermatologist and people who may consider that their skin condition requires professional care ought always consult a doctor first. However it’s fair to say that the vast bulk of people with sensitive skin problems do not have skin conditions requiring the care of a dermatologist.If you have delicate skin you know what it’s like. You get the skin redness, dryness, flaking and itching and your skin looks blotchy. However the sad truth is that in almost all cases where this is the case it is not the skin that is the problem but the products that are used on it.The reality is that delicate skin problems are commonly the result of the use of big brand mainstream products such as cosmetics, anti aging products, personal and beauty products such as soaps, shampoos and deodorants that contain ingredients that produce an irritant or allergic skin reaction.This is not because it is impossible to manufacture these products without using these ingredients. It is perfectly possible to manufacture high quality cost competitive personal and beauty care products that work extremely well and which use natural safe and effective ingredients. The problem is that most of the chemical ingredients that produce the skin reactions known as “sensitive skin” are extremely cheap. Many are chemical ingredients produced in a lab and used in many of the big name products that you might be using right now.In fact the problem of dangerous and irritating ingredients in personal products is now so serious that there are entire organizations set up to combat this. Perhaps the best known of these is the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics. They battle against the proliferation of chemical ingredients in personal products that are essentially dangerous to your health, that are irritants your skin and which are in some cases “known to cause cancer”.In fact it is unnecessary for there to be any sensitive skin products such as sensitive skin creams and sensitive skin moisturizers at all. There are many outstanding skin care products, for example, which are highly effective and which use only natural, known safe, and effective ingredients which can be used on all skin types and which do not produce any allergic or irritant skin reaction.In fact the company that makes the worlds best skin care products does not make any delicate skin products. This is because all of it’s products are safe to use on all skin types, work for all skin types, and do not produce any allergic skin reactions. If you use products such as these there is no need to buy any sensitive skin products.Sensitive skin care is not about selecting the best product for your skin type. It is about making a conscious decision to avoid the use of mainstream big brand personal, beauty and body care products such as cosmetics and skin care products, soaps shampoos and deodorants, and substituting natural skin care products and natural cosmetics in their place.If you’d like to find out where to source the worlds best natural skin care products and natural cosmetics visit my website where you can also see a discussion of many of the chemical ingredients used in modern products that cause so many of the sensitive skin care problems that we see in so many people today, and find what I consider to be the worlds best Sensitive Skin Care Products.