1. Choose a company of your choice discuss how proper use of management functions has enabled the company to be successful. Provide relevant examples.

Different scholars have come up with different categories of identifying the functions of the management. According to Griffin (2010), there are five basic functions of management and they include planning, staffing, organizing, directing and controlling. Coca Cola Company is the biggest manufacturer and distributer of beverages in the world. Coca Cola has successfully integrated the five fundamentals of management to produce 400 brands in 312 countries (Lewis et al., 2006).

Coca Cola Company has used planning in production and distribution of the beverages across the world. Planning is the basic function in any organization and involves mapping out the future course of action and deciding in advance the most suitable action to take so as to achieve the pre-determined goals. Planning in businesses generally involves deciding what to do, how to do it and when to do it. In other words, the management must engage in problem solving and decision making process in order to ensure the human and the non-human resources are utilized properly. Proper planning also helps to avoid uncertainties, risk and wastage of resources. For Coca Cola Company, planning comprises three layers of flat hierarchy. The top level of management has a duty in executing decisions in order to achieve the intended goals and objectives. The Coca Cola goals are changed after every three years. The Managing Director of the company sets goals after getting clearance from the headquarter office. Coca Cola company goals and objectives are revised every three years, including providing quality products to valuable customers and retaining and selecting professional people for the organization.

Coca Cola Company also does organizing as a function of management. Organizing refers to putting together all human, financial and physical resources and coming up with a production relationship that will help in the achievement of the set goals. The following procedures are taken into account by Coca Cola Company in order to achieve its goals and objective: Work specialization, resource allocation, departmentalization, and delegation and accountability. For instance, departmentalization involves grouping employees according to their different skills and knowledge for different departments. The aim is to help the company to solve problems without the need for training the employees to specialize in particular activities (Reilly & Williams, 2012).

Coca Cola Company has some standard performance goals which are used to measure its success and to control the output of the employees. Controlling involves measuring achievements by establishing the standard performance. In this function, if the company evaluates that it has successfully achieved more than what had been set before, every employee is rewarded with bonuses. For instance, the Sales Person Evaluating System for the sales persons is done quarterly and standard sales of the products are set to measure how much the sales persons have made. Sales persons with high records of sale promoted to higher ranks in the sales department. Coca Cola also uses the performance development plan as a performance standard for evaluating its employees. Each year, the sales persons are evaluated on the basis of call slips, call completions and call routes, growth in sales and the punctuality of the sales persons (Reilly & Williams, 2012).

Directing is part of the managerial activities that ensures that the organizational methods work efficiently for the achievement of the set goals. Coca Cola Company ensures a high degree of delegation and accountability. Each manager is held responsible for the actions of his subordinates (Reilly & Williams, 2012).

Coca Cola Company also ensures proper staffing of the employees with an aim of making sure that every employee given the right job. Coca Cola Company provides job vacancies through advertisements and newspapers with the requirements for those job positions. The vacancies are announced within the company so that if there is someone who fulfills the needed requirements, he or she can be promoted to fill in the available vacancy (Reilly & Williams, 2012).

2. Discuss some of the management functions the company may have failed to implement that has led to failure on the part of management.

Similar to any other business organization, Coca Cola Company faces some challenges in its management functions which include both the external and internal factors. The internal factors include factors which are close to the business organization or the microenvironmental factors. The internal factors are controlled by the organization which includes the supplies, consumers and the competitors. The external factors are also known as the microenvironment factors and are uncontrollable by the organization. They include political, social, legal, environmental and legal factors (Griffin, 2010).

Coca Cola produces non-alcoholic beverages and as such, political factors have imposed restrictions that force the company to comply with the Food and Drug Administration Act (FDA). These legal factors have affected the company in making planning decisions, especially their entry into foreign lands. The company has been facing charges in laws and regulations which include environmental laws, foreign jurisdictions and taxation requirements. These restrictions have resulted to pricing pressures on its products, causing pressure on its ability to maintain share in the global markets (Griffin, 2010).

Economic factors such as inflation and recession have affected the company in terms of staffing. In regions where the economic conditions are not good, the company has been forced to increase its prices in order to maintain the salaries of its employees. As a result, this has caused negative impact on the production of coke. In Pakistan, for example, there is high rate of unemployment; as a result, the company has been facing challenges of retaining some employees due to low sales for its product (Griffin, 2010).

The company has been trying to implement the latest technology that can reduce the cost of production of coke and increase its profits. The company has been trying to reduce its costs of production using cheap resources such as the plastic cans for the packaging of the drinks.

However, these adjustments plans have caused negative impacts to the environment in terms of improper disposal of the wastes (Griffin, 2010).

The company has also faced some problems in directing. Legal and political factors have affected the firm’s behavior in some countries and as a result, this has reduced its overall productivity. For instance, in 1970, the company refused to share its secret formula in India and was stopped from importing its products locally; for duration of sixteen years. Coca Cola Company has also faced some charges due to the failure by the management to control the amount of carbon dioxide contained in its products. For instance, in 2003, the organizations in India said that the Coca Cola products contained poisonous substances such as malathion that could cause cancer (Griffin, 2010).

References

Griffin, R. (2010). Management. Natorp Boulevard: Cengage Learning

Lewis, P., Goodman, S., Fandt, P., Michlitsch, J. (2006). Management: Challenges for

tomorrow’s leaders. Belmont: Cengage Learning

Reilly, P., Williams, T. (2012). Global HR: Challenges facing the function. New York, NY:

Gower Publishing, Ltd