Managing Priorities in Volkswagen of America

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Review of the Subsidiary’s New Process
Assessment of the New Process
Discussion and conclusion
References

Introduction

Volkswagen is an international motor vehicle company that has subsidiaries across the world. Volkswagen of America is the company’s subsidiary in the North American region that oversees the regional operations.

This paper seeks to review the new process for managing priorities of the subsidiary. The paper will carry out an assessment of the new management priorities, review criticisms for the new priorities and compare the new process with the subsidiary’s old process.

Review of the Subsidiary’s New Process

The Volkswagen Company is an old company that realized it automobile model in the second quarter of the twentieth century. The company then started its operations but was to wait till the years of 1960s for a boom in the market for its market products.

The company’s productivity however was then startled with an up and down trend in its sales and revenues after the boom period. The introduction of a new brand in the year 1977 witnessed an improvement in the company’s performance that again fell later on.

This led to the perception that the company’s management was only relying on new products as a solution to the company’s problems. This trend was continued with the diversification of product brands after the year 2000, a move that made the Volkswagen of America to institute strategies into adjusting to the changes.

The management of the group’s American subsidiary also based their operation management on marketing and sales of products. Information technology was overlooked and its expenditure and personnel even cut down. This however relayed a long term effect as the impact of insufficient knowledge in IT was evident in the company.

The company then resorted to the development of its IT which was then established to be the basis of managing its priorities. In the new strategy, established IT departments would collaborate with consultants prioritizing projects for the group. Under this approach, questions such as why, who, what, where and when would be employed by the experts to establish ground for prioritizing the projects.

The new development ensured a comprehensive consideration of the entire group with respect to opinions, functions and information in departments.

The established IT teams were the major players in the use of the new system for prioritization of the subsidiary’s projects that included invitation for projects presentation and identification of dependencies of various projects, the formal presentation of projects by departments and the final work by the IT teams over the submitted projects.

The team would then work out the proposals to give them an organizational perspective contrary to departmental ones before prioritization were made to the funding of projects. This process however led to poor funding of projects that were critical to the groups operations calling for adjustments for their funding.

Assessment of the New Process

The integration of information technology into the management system of an organization is very instrumental to the operational processes. One of the primary benefits of information technology is the developed level of efficiency in processes.

This is coupled with a significant level of information that the management is offered from the application of technology. The process of decision making with respect to prioritizing projects of the Volkswagen Company of America would thus provide the management with more information that relates the projects together so as to establish a base for informed decision making process.

The use of information technology is also beneficial in the sense that it aids planning. By bringing the organization’s departmental proposals together and running a review into their relationships, a better understanding into the correlation of the processes is established for a final decision making (Joia, 2003).

Application of information technology into a management’s system is also characterized with an increased level of productivity of processes. Whether in the production processes or in decision making process, information technology will improve the productivity level.

Better knowledge of processes through analysis and monitoring of information is another tool to accurate decision making. Better information models can also be achieved through the capacities of information technology. The efficiency as realized in the use of the technologies also reflects on the time taken to attain required analysis into decision making (DuBrin, 2008).

The use of information technology is however identified to be more applicable in service oriented organizations than in manufacturing industries. Its application in such commodity based organization as Volkswagen of America is therefore expected to at least face a few challenges. Justification of application of information technology in such is also a challenge to manufacturing organizations (Akpan, 2007).

Discussion and conclusion

The new management process at the Volkswagen of America is satisfactory in terms of the analysis that proposals are accorded with respect to the objectives of the organization. This ensures that projects geared to the attainment of the organizations objectives such as increasing sales are prioritized.

Criticisms to the systems are justified due to its inability to prioritize all projects. This is however not significant because the benefits of the system outweighs its failure and shortcomings.

The new system which incorporates analytical approaches is in general terms better than the old system in which regards were only made to marketing and sales initiatives that actually had not proved successful to the firm.

References

Akpan, E. (2007). Strategic Alignment: The Business Imperative for Leading Organizations. Mustang: Tate Publishing.

DuBrin, A. (2008). Essentials of Management. New York, NY: Cengage Learning.

Joia, L. (2003). IT-based management: challenges and solutions. London, UK: Idea Group Inc (IGI).

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