What is JET Essay Example

What is JET? Essay The J TAB personnel would be able to address all inquires and handle customer problems 90 percent of the time on the first call. The remaining 1 0 percent of the problems would be resolved in one day with a follow-up call. Danni Raman was assigned as the project manager responsible for the creation and development of the ICC. In developing this center he was tasked to display the kind of entrepreneurial behavior the chairman of JET was seeking to develop. Mr.. Amoral, the energetic and dynamic chairman of JET seeking to change JET tactful company from a stiff bureaucracy to a nimble entrepreneurial-driven-firm. The design was to have the center function as a central services profit center supporting the separate tactful business units of JET. Danni, a seasoned manager, saw this assignment as a real career opportunity. He began to think about meaningful indicators and measures for success of the center. He was politically savvy and wanted the performance of this center to stand on its true accomplishments. Background: Product Lines Responding to Declining Growth Rates JET was one of the largest tactful firms based in Asia. It had a worldwide operation and was recently acquired by another major tactful company. JET had enjoyed remarkable growth of more than 25 percent each year over the past 10 years. The firm had used a series of acquisitions to broaden the type of tactful offerings and had also grown internally to meet the expanding needs of its served market. It sold various forms of tactful in the health, life, casualty, property and automotive areas. Over the last couple of years the growth Of premium income in the Malaysia tactful industry had leveled off. In 1993 and 1994, the industry still enjoyed high growth rates and grew at 10. 3 percent and 9. 5 percent, respectively. We will write a custom essay sample on What is JET? specifically for you for only $16.38 $13.9/page Order now We will write a custom essay sample on What is JET? specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer We will write a custom essay sample on What is JET? specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer By 995, however, the growth rate had decreased to only 4. 8 percent. By 1 996 and 1997, growth was flat instead of the planned 3 percent and the expectation was that growth will only be moderate, if any growth is recorded at all. The declining growth rates resulted from a set of reinforcing trends: 1 Worsening economic climate with increasing economic downsizing, increasing unemployed, and stagnating real income. 2. Higher taxes, in part due to the unstable economic. 3. Increasing competition resulting from the deregulation of the Asian market, which was fully noticeable for the first time in 1995. Extensive satisfactions of the basic demand for tactful in Malaysia, an area of sustained growth Upton 1994. Despite these worsening market conditions, the operating divisions of JET were often able to gain market share. However, the squeeze of increasing competition and increasing client price sensitivity led in the private tactful market to shorter contracts and more cancellation of existing contracts. This effect varied in intensity by product line. In response, product lines and the branch offices began to pay more attention to providing a better service as a way to keep agents, brokers and existing clients satisfied. There was a range of ideas and responses to the problem, varying from remaking newsletters for customers to creating a Calling Center. The latter was in response to the complaints of many customers, agents and brokers about the difficulties of reaching clerks and about the level of service they received if and when they could reach them. Within the decentralized structure offset, in which product lines operated rather independently, a number of calling centers were created. Those more concentrated product lines, such as Life and Health, created their own central loophole centers. Some branch offices also created telephone centers for those product lines that had decentralized much of their clerical work to the branches. Reforming the Lapse Rate Problem as a Customer Loyalty Problem Traditionally the firm, through its two brand names, JUST and 41ST, had focused on the lower middle segment of the market that was not very price sensitive. Exclusive agents handled 70 percent of this business. The increasing defection rate began to draw the attention of some senior executives. They ordered a study by an international management consultant. In March 1996, this firm reported that the lapse rate- the number Of customers canceling contracts compared to the total amount of contracts- had reached ARM millions in 1995 (ARM mom in 1996), which is around 10 percent of total premium revenue. The lapse rate percentage was comparable to other Malaysia tactful firms. In some products, such as car tactful, the figures were much higher (20 percent) and had passed a pain threshold. The firm also reported that the commissions of the agents were almost exclusively tied to generating new contracts. The agents were pending 70 percent of their time just generating enough new business to keep up with cancellations. If this trend were to continue, they would have to spend 100 percent of their time by the year 2000 on just finding new business to keep up with cancellations. In depth interviews with defected customers, or root cause interviews, indicated that 58. 7 percent of the defections could be influenced by JET (without changes in the contracts), indicating that 5. 8 percent of the customer base of the firm was lost through the firms own fault. Dissatisfied customers mentioned (apart from price, 33. Recent): problems with agents (34. 7 percent), bad claims processing (13. 3 percent), slow and bureaucratic responses (9. 3 percent), and too little information (4. 0 percent). When customers mentioned high price, it would often not be an issue as such but in combination with other problems such as dissatisfaction about the agent. Finally, the firm found the following: Customers who had more than one tactful contract were less likely to defect. Trigger events (e. G. , exasperation about being passed from one clerk to another without getting any help) seemed to precipitate cancellation. If a customer with several policies cancelled one, it was likely that the customer would not continue when other contracts came up for renewal. The traditional market research techniques used by JET, the consultant maintained, were not able to detect these kinds of problems because they were geared more toward customer satisfaction with a (new) product and not event/action related. The lapse rate problem for JET was summarized by the image of a leaking bucket; new customers would flow into the bucket while at the same time many leaked out through big holes. The focus of product lines was on was on increasing the inflow rather than intelligently addressing the outflow. This was not only the case within JET but also the case throughout the Malaysia tactful industry. Instead of focusing on the lapse rate or customer defection rate of individual product lines, the problem was restated as a customer loyalty problem that cut across product lines and was considered a corporate problem. A Corporate Problem: From Vicious to Virtual Cycles Customers looked at the firm as a whole, not as a product line with whom they had one contract. It turned out that the more contracts customers had, the longer they remained loyal to JET. The longer they remained with the firm the lower the commissions for new products and the lower the damage rate. If this virtual cycle were to lead to small improvements in customer retention, profitability would be significantly improved. Conversely, if customers had only one contract, they cancelled much more frequently. Replacement then led to a commission for the agent. And when this process gained enough momentum-as it did-all tactful firms suffered from high lapse rates and paid high commissions, hence a vicious cycle. To introduce a virtual cycle, customer retention would have to become a tragic target. There were many positive ideas and responses in J Tabs product lines and branch offices at the time. There were also mangers who thought quite differently. They felt the responses were often geared to symptoms, and would have little positive effect on the business. With regard to the telephone centers, a senior manager from one Of the product lines mentioned that they lacked critical mass. There would be in sufficient sophisticated technology and training of personnel, and not enough would be learned from the customer. The customer needed to be viewed as a person, a family, or even an extended family, going through a life-cycle with critical with critical events (like getting a drivers license, getting married, having kids, buying a house, setting up a retirement fund, etc. ) each creating new tactful needs. The firm was a collection of product lines. In anticipation of future business, JET should try to satisfy the customer needs in all of these stages. Moreover, rather than the risk of each customer being treated as part of a large pool with certain statistical averages, customers could and should be segmented into highly profitable groups, not profitable groups, and loss-generating groups. The firm as a whole should proactively pick and target the most profitable groups, and learn more about the customers. At the same time, it should defend its existing customer base through (i) becoming sensitive to early signals of defection, (ii) monitoring carefully trigger events, and (iii) trying to recover lost contracts/customers. While the efforts of individual product lines would be important, clearly, some executives at the corporate level felt that there was a need for a comprehensive and integrated approach. However, such an approach should be taken in incremental steps. The First Step: Quick Hits and New Discoveries The data suggested that JET could benefit from using a number of ideas for customer retention derived from the practices of leading Malaysia tactful firms and banks as well as new internal intentions. The JET Board of Directors ordered a specific study of customer loyalty for J TAB between May 1 996 and October 1996. It was anticipated that this would create ideas for quick hits and begin to close the holes in the bucket. But the project also led to new discoveries about the prevailing thinking in the firm concerning the customers. According to one of the consultants: 1 A customer typically called because his or her agent was either unreachable (either a part -timer, or trying to generate new business) or could not effectively address a question. When a customer called one product line, say, Health, and then had a question about Life Tactful, the Health clerk would say, l dont know. On average, it would take a client four contracts to get to the right person, and even then, in 30 percent of the cases, the questions were not resolved. Customers tended to cancel when a specific question or problem was dealt with in the wrong way. 2. A clerk working in one product nine had only one screen (related to the contract that line had with the client) and had little access to information about other contracts the customer may have had. However, if a customer with multiple policies cancelled one policy because the customer was dissatisfied with the service in one product line, this person was likely to cancel the other policies as well. The clerks often did not sense the business was at risk because, quite literally, it was not on their screen, and therefore the pattern of defections remained hidden. 3. Car tactful played a critical role in binding clients because it was often the first interact. It appeared that most people bought a car on the weekend when tactful firms were closed. In addition, it was difficult to create a team to help clients because, in general, customers could not reach a clerk after 5:00 and trade unions did not allow work after 6:00. Therefore, the response to the idea was often yes, but it cant be done. 4. Most people talked about the customer but didnt do anything about improving the customer service. The firm had a strong analytical culture. When confronted with the figures, they would say, this is true for health but not for life or it is worse with other tactful firms. 5. When customer focus groups were organized in June 1 997, the Board of Directors members were invited to attend. Only one showed up apart from the manager of the study. The others maintained that we know the customer. The Customer Care Center By October 1996 when the results of the customer loyalty studies were in, the Stabs Board of Directors ordered a feasibility study for a ICC reaching far beyond specific products lines. The key idea was to provide customers with one telephone number and professionally trained people who could effectively answer a variety of questions, and thereby increase the service aromatically. In addition, a center would be able to eliminate process steps in the future and eliminate sources of errors. Finally, it was believed that the center would be a cheaper and more efficient way of processing information. By January 1997, an outline for the center design was ready and specified the following goals: 1. Stabs private customers would have one and only one telephone number for all their questions and problems. This service would be available to them in addition to the agents. 2. The center would be open 24 hours per day and 7 days per week. It would be able to finalize 90 percent of al customer inquiries in one telephone call. It would lead to a significant increase in service quality efficiency. 3. J TAB would benefit from a reduction in the lapse rate, specifically, In cases where, in the past, the clients inquiry was not addressed or the service was unsatisfactory. 4. Additional goals of JET were (a) becoming a service leader in the tactful industry, (b) increasing the number of customers with multiple policies. Concern and Inventing Solutions The proposal generated a number Of concerns. For instance, the agents saw the center as a threat to their relationship with the client. In response, it was cited that agents would be informed of any communication between the center and his or her clients. Moreover the center could act as a backup for the agent in case the agent was inaccessible to the client (e. G. , at night and on the weekend). Finally, the center could help agents by contacting prospective clients. Typically, an agent might get one out of ten potential tactful contracts. The center could provide a first screen by telephone and improve this ratio. The product lines had a different concern. They thought that it was impossible that a generalist could address questions related to their peccadillo business and that it would take at least ten years of experience to learn to do this. However, it was discovered that product line clerks got caught in a vicious cycle. Typically, the clerks intended to provide the highest possible quality when talking to customers but in doing so tended to become too technical. Their response was over-engineered and they tended to waste their time while the client became exasperated. In addition, many customers had the same kinds of questions. An expert might become annoyed when having to repeat the answers or might forget etc mention part of the answers. Less specialized persons with additional skills, however, might quite easily answer questions based on scripts that provide good answers. Finally, it turned out that at least 70 to 80 percent of the questions (depending on the product lines) were rather mundane and did not need a specialist to answer them because the question was merely about the Status of a claim or the customer gave a change of address, etc. Again, an expert might become exasperated with such questions. A special team with extended product knowledge could still address the remaining 20 to 30 Recent A final set of concerns had to do with the fact that calling centers were already established in some product lines and branch offices. For instance, if somebody changed an address, a product lines would argue that this couldnt be dealt with by a center because a change of address might have implications for tactful related to the house. Or some product lines would say, We are learning from the market through our own calling center, and now we lose our ear, or Why break up a winning team? At the time that a central center was discussed, some of the branch offices ad just installed their own telephone centers as a way to screen calls to the back office. Branch office managers had received employee acceptance by claiming that this was their future. Dismantling their unit would undermine trustworthiness. The first two concerns could be dealt with through agreements about making information in the center readily accessible to the product lines. The latter concern might be dealt with, in part, by a promise that the center would be in Or around the two branch offices with telephones centers. This would make it easy for employees to apply for jobs in the central enter. By April 1997, the Board of Directors had agreed on the following critical aspects for the centers design. 1 . The ICC would be a Greenfield solution and it would be the only center within the JET. Other newly established calling centers in branches and some product lines would be closed down. 2. It would centralize all customer inquiries and be available 100 percent of the time, and able to address effectively 90 percent of all questions and problems. 3. The center would be established outside the existing organizational structure of JET, i. E it would not be part of any of the product nines or operating divisions. This would also make it possible to sign more flexible employment contracts (flexible working hours and com penetrations). 4. The center would be profit center and be paid on a telephone call basis by the product lines rather than a cost center supported by corporate or the operating divisions overhead. 5. The center would be a stand-alone central service business unit with a mission to support the product lines. 6. The product lines would supply tactful technical know-how and competent personnel, and interface with the product lines would be clearly organized. During the first year, the center would focus on inquiry initiated by the client. In addition, it would also initiate inquiries on behalf of product lines in case a customer canceled a contract. This initial set-up would require and EDP system with the least integration into the rest of the IT infrastructure of the JET, allowing for an autonomous EDP center for the ICC with only a relatively small link to the Central EDP. However, as soon as the center operated effectively (expected within half a year of its opening), new tasks could be added. For instance, the center could become involved in the claims recessing, in correcting errors, or changing information such as addresses, etc. It could also carry out marketing research at the request of the product lines. And finally, it might become the care center for agents and brokers as well. The customers (depending on the product line) would expect the center to address 70 to 80 percent of the inquiries through its generalists. The remaining 20 to 30 percent of questions would be passed on to specialized teams with extended product knowledge in the center. Not only would the processing within the center be transparent and traceable, thereby reducing errors, the links to the product lines would be transparent and traceable as well. Indicators and Measurement of Success The center would have to be up and running within one year, in May 1998. The effort would be widely watched within the firm and within the Malaysia tactful industry. If successful, JET would have a first-mover advantage and be instrumental in reshaping the industry. But what were meaningful indicators of success of the ICC and how to measure that success? Should Danni, the project manager for the new center, focus on one indicator, or on a set of indicators reflecting a wider sense of performance? How many should he focus on, and which are really critical? Which indicators can he really influence and how? When asked how we would measure success with the clients, Danni initially mentioned: a decreasing lapse rate-that part of the lapse rate, connected to the service quality of the JET, should decrease. However, other executives differed about what constitute a Balanced Score Card. For instance, a senior executive suggested: speed of processing efficiency in terms of cutting out process steps, quality in terms of fewer errors, accessible all the time, and friendliness of the telephone operators.

Tips on How to Pass an Essay Flyer

Tips on How to Pass an Essay FlyerIt's likely that you've already had a discussion with a professor or some other instructor about writing a particular essay for the exam. As you've probably gathered, there are a variety of criteria that the professor is using to grade the essay. And of course, they will have different views as to how to determine those. The good news is that there is a way to give a particular essay a much better chance of passing.You should always have a general sense of the different factors that will be considered in determining whether or not your particular essay passes. But just in case you haven't, the majority of the criteria will revolve around the style and content of the essay. Keep in mind that the point of the essay is to prove a certain point, so it would be best to show that point through your writing.Even with the various ways in which a good quality essay may be graded, there is still an element of discussion about what the overall theme of the essa y should be. That could be as simple as asking if the content of the essay fits the style or theme of the class level that the class is being taught at. In fact, there is such a style or theme, that the essay needs to adhere to this theme so that all students can take the lesson at hand.One way to show that the essay follows the theme is to include a one-sentence introduction to the essay, showing a little bit of what the student is going to cover. In fact, it could even be used as a brief outline for the entire essay. One could always show examples, but that would have to be shown in a document that contains more information.The next step would be to analyze your essay. Write down as many questions that you have regarding the content of the essay. You should also look at the format of the essay and how it flows. Think about the types of words that are used and what words the students in the class use.Your analysis may show that it does fit into a certain genre or that it is too lon g. You may even find that it may be an outline rather than a true essay. Don't give up until you find the answer that you're looking for.It's a very easy task to analyze the essay and see whether or not it has a better chance of passing. However, before you start writing your own essay, you should still be able to pull together the things that you learn from the instructor. Sometimes it's best to follow the advice and judgment of the instructor in order to determine whether or not you have provided a good essay for the class.

Biography of Aviator Amelia Earhart

Biography of Aviator Amelia Earhart Amelia Earhart the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean and the first person to make a solo flight across both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans.  Earhart also set several height and speed records in an airplane. Despite all these records, Amelia Earhart is perhaps best remembered for her mysterious disappearance, which has become one of the enduring mysteries of the 20th century. While attempting to become the first woman to fly around the world, she disappeared on July 2, 1937, while heading toward Howlands Island. Dates: July 24, 1897 July 2, 1937(?) Also Known As: Amelia Mary Earhart, Lady Lindy Amelia Earhart’s Childhood Amelia Mary Earhart was born in her maternal grandparents’ home in Atchison, Kansas, on July 24, 1897 to Amy and Edwin Earhart. Although Edwin was a lawyer, he never earned the approval of Amy’s parents, Judge Alfred Otis and his wife, Amelia. In 1899, two-and-a-half years after Amelia’s birth, Edwin and Amy welcomed another daughter, Grace Muriel. Amelia Earhart spent much of her early childhood living with her Otis grandparents in Atchison during the school months and then spending her summers with her parents. Earhart’s early life was filled with outdoor adventures combined with the etiquette lessons expected of upper-middle-class girls of her day. Amelia (known as â€Å"Millie† in her youth) and her sister Grace Muriel (known as â€Å"Pidge†) loved to play together, especially outdoors. After visiting the World’s Fair in St. Louis in 1904, Amelia decided she wanted to build her own mini roller coaster in her backyard. Enlisting Pidge to help, the two built a homemade roller coaster on the roof of the tool shed, using planks, a wooden box, and lard for grease. Amelia took the first ride, which ended with a crash and some bruises – but she loved it. By 1908, Edwin Earhart had closed his private law firm and was working as a lawyer for a railroad in Des Moines, Iowa; thus, it was time for Amelia to move back in with her parents. That same year, her parents took her to the Iowa State Fair where 10-year-old Amelia saw an airplane for the very first time. Surprisingly, it didn’t interest her. Problems at Home At first, life in Des Moines seemed to be going well for the Earhart family; however, it soon became obvious that Edwin had started to drink heavily. When his alcoholism got worse, Edwin eventually lost his job in Iowa and had trouble finding another. In 1915, with the promise of a job with the Great Northern Railway in St. Paul, Minnesota, the Earhart family packed up and moved. However, the job fell through once they got there. Tired of her husband’s alcoholism and the family’s increasing money troubles, Amy Earhart moved herself and her daughters to Chicago, leaving their father behind in Minnesota. Edwin and Amy eventually divorced in 1924. Due to her family’s frequent moves, Amelia Earhart switched high schools six times, making it hard for her to make or keep friends during her teen years. She did well in her classes  but preferred sports. She graduated from Chicago’s Hyde Park High School in 1916 and is listed in the school’s yearbook as â€Å"the girl in brown who walks alone.† Later in life, however, she was known for her friendly and outgoing nature. After high school, Earhart went to the Ogontz School in Philadelphia, but she soon dropped out to become a nurse for returning World War I soldiers and for victims of the influenza epidemic of 1918. First Flights It wasn’t until 1920, when Earhart was 23 years old, that she developed an interest in airplanes. While visiting her father in California she attended an air show and the stunt-flying feats she watched convinced her that she had to try flying for herself. Earhart took her first flying lesson on January 3, 1921. According to her instructors, Earhart wasn’t a â€Å"natural† at piloting an airplane; instead, she made up for a lack of talent with plenty of hard work and passion. Earhart received her â€Å"Aviator Pilot† certification from the Federation Aeronautique Internationale on May 16, 1921 a major step for any pilot at the time. Since her parents could not afford to pay for her lessons, Earhart worked several jobs to raise the money herself. She also saved up the money to buy her own airplane, a small Kinner Airster she called the Canary. In the Canary, she broke the women’s altitude record on October 22, 1922, by becoming the first woman to reach 14,000 feet in an airplane. The First Woman to Fly Over the Atlantic In 1927, aviator Charles Lindbergh made history by becoming the first person to fly non-stop across the Atlantic, from the U.S. to England. A year later, Amelia Earhart was asked to make a non-stop flight across the same ocean. She had been discovered by publisher George Putnam, who had been asked to look for a female pilot to complete this feat. Since this was not to be a solo flight, Earhart joined a crew of two other aviators, both men. On June 17, 1928, the journey began when the Friendship, a Fokker F7 specially outfitted for the trip, took off from Newfoundland bound for England. Ice and fog made the trip difficult and Earhart spent much of the flight scribbling notes in a journal while her co-pilots, Bill Stultz and Louis Gordon, handled the plane. 20 Hours and 40 Minutes in the Air On June 18, 1928, after 20 hours and 40 minutes in the air, the Friendship landed in South Wales. Although Earhart said she did not contribute any more to the flight than â€Å"a sack of potatoes† would have, the press saw her accomplishment differently. They started calling Earhart â€Å"Lady Lindy,† after Charles Lindbergh. Shortly after this trip, Earhart published a book about her experiences, titled 20 Hours 40 Minutes. Before long Amelia Earhart was looking for new records to break in her own airplane. A few months after publishing 20 Hours 40 Minutes, she flew solo across the United States and back the first time a female pilot had made the journey alone. In 1929, she founded and participated in the Woman’s Air Derby, an airplane race from Santa Monica, California to Cleveland, Ohio with a substantial cash prize. Flying a more powerful Lockheed Vega, Earhart finished third, behind noted pilots Louise Thaden and Gladys O’Donnell. On February 7, 1931, Earhart married George Putnam. She also banded together with other female aviators to start a professional international organization for female pilots. Earhart was the first president. The Ninety-Niners, named because it originally had 99 members, still represents and supports female pilots today. Earhart published a second book about her accomplishments, The Fun of It, in 1932. Solo Across the Ocean Having won multiple competitions, flown in air shows, and set new altitude records, Earhart began looking for a bigger challenge. In 1932, she decided to become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. On May 20, 1932, she took off again from Newfoundland, piloting a small Lockheed Vega. It was a dangerous trip: clouds and fog made it difficult to navigate, her plane’s wings became covered with ice, and the plane developed a fuel leak about two-thirds of the way across the ocean. Worse, the altimeter stopped working, so Earhart had no idea how far above the ocean’s surface her plane was a situation that nearly resulted in her crashing into the Atlantic Ocean. Touched Down in a Sheep Pasture in Ireland In serious danger, Earhart abandoned her plans to land at Southampton, England, and made for the first bit of land she saw. She touched down in a sheep pasture in Ireland on May 21, 1932, becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and the first-ever person to fly across the Atlantic twice. The solo Atlantic crossing was followed by more book deals, meetings with heads of state, and a lecture tour, as well as more flying competitions. In 1935, Earhart also made a solo flight from Hawaii to Oakland, California, becoming the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to the U.S. mainland. This trip also made Earhart the first person to fly solo across both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Her Last Flight Not long after making her Pacific flight in 1935, Amelia Earhart decided she wanted to try flying around the entire world. A U.S. Army Air Force crew had made the trip in 1924 and male aviator Wiley Post flew around the world by himself in 1931 and 1933. Two New Goals But Earhart had two new goals. First, she wanted to be the first woman to fly solo around the world. Second, she wanted to fly around the world at or near the equator, the planet’s widest point: the previous flights had both circled the world much closer to the North Pole, where the distance was shortest. Planning and preparation for the trip were difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Her plane, a Lockheed Electra, had to be completely re-fitted with additional fuel tanks, survival gear, scientific instruments, and a state-of-the-art radio. A 1936 test flight ended in a crash that destroyed the plane’s landing gear. Several months passed while the plane was fixed. The Most Difficult Point in the Trip Meanwhile, Earhart and her navigator, Frank Noonan, plotted their course around the world. The most difficult point in the trip would be the flight from Papua New Guinea to Hawaii because it required a fuel stop at Howland’s Island, a small coral island about 1,700 miles west of Hawaii. Aviation maps were poor at the time and the island would be difficult to find from the air. However, the stop at Howland’s Island was unavoidable because the plane could only carry about half the fuel needed to fly from Papua New Guinea to Hawaii, making a fuel stop essential if Earhart and Noonan were to make it across the South Pacific. As difficult as it might be to find, Howland’s Island seemed like the best choice for a stop since it is positioned approximately halfway between Papua New Guinea and Hawaii. Once their course had been plotted and their plane readied, it was time for the final details. It was during this last minute preparation that Earhart decided not to take the full-sized radio antenna that Lockheed recommended, instead opting for a smaller antenna. The new antenna was lighter, but it also could not transmit or receive signals as well, especially in bad weather. The First Leg of Their Trip On May 21, 1937, Amelia Earhart and Frank Noonan took off from Oakland, California, on the first leg of their trip. The plane landed first in Puerto Rico and then in several other locations in the Caribbean before heading to Senegal. They crossed Africa, stopping several times for fuel and supplies, then went on to Eritrea, India, Burma, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea. There, Earhart and Noonan prepared for the toughest stretch of the trip the landing at Howland’s Island. Since every pound in the plane meant more fuel used, Earhart removed every non-essential item even the parachutes. The plane was checked and re-checked by mechanics to ensure it was in top condition. However, Earhart and Noonan had been flying for over a month straight by this time and both were tired. Left Papua New Guinea Heading Toward Howland’s Island On July 2, 1937, Earhart’s plane left Papua New Guinea heading toward Howland’s Island. For the first seven hours, Earhart and Noonan stayed in radio contact with the airstrip in Papua New Guinea. After that, they made intermittent radio contact with the U.S.S. Itsaca, a Coast Guard ship patrolling the waters below. However, the reception was poor and messages between the plane and the Itsaca were frequently lost or garbled. The Plane Did Not Appear Two hours after Earhart’s scheduled arrival at Howland’s Island, at about 10:30 a.m. local time on July 2, 1937, the Itsaca received a last static-filled message that indicated Earhart and Noonan could not see the ship or the island and they were almost out of fuel. The crew of the Itsaca tried to signal the ship’s location by sending up black smoke, but the plane did not appear. Neither the plane, Earhart, nor Noonan were ever seen or heard from again. The Mystery Continues The mystery of what happened to Earhart, Noonan, and the plane has not yet been solved. In 1999, British archaeologists claimed to have found artifacts on a small island in the South Pacific that contained Earhart’s DNA, but the evidence is not conclusive. Near the plane’s last known location, the ocean reaches depths of 16,000 feet, well below the range of today’s deep-sea diving equipment. If the plane sank into those depths, it may never be recovered.

How to handle overly aggressive people at work

How to handle overly aggressive people at work Competition at work isn’t the worst thing in the world- an atmosphere where everyone strives for success can encourage personal and professional growth and make a company thrive. But when the motivation to excel gets out of hand, people can go from competitive to aggressive and alienate coworkers who are just trying to come in, do a good job, and get along with everyone. If you have a particularly aggressive or competitive coworker, here are a few strategies for neutralizing their intensity.Stand up for yourself.If your competitive coworker does something particularly egregious- like taking sole credit for a group effort or stealing choice projects out from under you- consider going to your boss or to HR and explaining the situation. You don’t want to do this often, or too early, or with weak evidence. But if the situation has escalated such that your reputation and opportunities are taking a hit? Make sure you cover your own back- in a calm and professional manner, of course.Build and keep relationships.Sometimes, aggressive coworkers aren’t content simply to talk over you in meetings and undercut you in professional setting- they’ll try to ice you out socially, as well. Your job is to rise above and be the best colleague and officemate you can be. Cultivate real relationships among your colleagues. Gain respect as a well-regarded and valuable team player. Rise above negativity. Help people out. Deliver and be true to your word. Whatever you do, don’t isolate yourself because you’re avoiding this one person- that’s what he or she wants.Stay focused on doing your job well.Keep your eyes on your own work and making it as stellar as possible. Don’t succumb to playing the competition game- you’ll never â€Å"win† against a particularly competitive colleague, and there is no battle anyway.  Compete only against yourself- do great work that people can depend on and aim to continually improve.Dou ble check your read of the situation.If you’re always getting crazy toxic competition vibes from this person, make sure that maybe you haven’t misread or misunderstood the situation. If reaching out to this coworker for a private one-on-one over a cup of coffee is an option, give it a shot. Talk about how you don’t want to compete or diminish their accomplishments, and let them know you’re not trying to one-up them. Maybe it’s all a misunderstanding. Before you make an enemy of a coworker- even in your head- make sure they’re truly adversarial and not just awkward.Take a look around.Maybe you’ve entered a culture of aggression. Is it really just that one person who’s making you feel uneasy, or is your work atmosphere highly competitive as a whole? If you assess the situation and notice that the majority of your coworkers are just as cutthroat, then the problem might be the job. If you can accept and deal with it, great. If not, you might want to consider working for a different company where there’s more of a collaborative culture.

Micro Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Micro - Assignment Example This will result in an outward shift of the PPF curve. 2) The reason why countries such as Costa Rica and Bangladesh are better placed to produce shirts and then export them to the United States is because of their competitive advantage, not an absolute advantage. Let’s use Vietnam as an example. The wages that have to be paid to Vietnamese workers are far less than those that would be expected by American workers. This means that it is better for America to import goods such as shirts from third-world countries because it can be produced far cheaper. Even with the added costs of transportation, this option is still better than America producing the goods domestically. So even though the United States has an absolute advantage in almost every good, it makes logical sense for them to outsource work that can be done cheaper somewhere else. 3) The reason why countries such as China and India use manual laborers is because it is cost effective to do this in those countries. Also, these countries may not have the same technological expertise to produce machines to do the work for them. Even if this is the case, the average wage is so low that it does not cost very much to pay for human workers. On the other hand, in the United States, the minimum wage is so great that is would be too expensive to have to pay individual laborers to perform the work. Also, the United States is a technologically advanced country and can thus produce street cleaning machines to do the work. The total cost of making and using these machines is probably less than what it would be to have to pay manual laborers; thus it makes sense to use heavy street cleaning machines. 4) The reason why there is so much opposition to international trade is that some people argue that it hurts the local economy because of the loss of jobs for home workers. While international trade can be a good thing for the

Advanced Persistent Threats Against RSA Tokens Case Study

Advanced Persistent Threats Against RSA Tokens - Case Study Example Likewise, in the entire hoax, there was a requirement of evaluating homeland security that also pertains to Information technology infrastructure. The Information technology infrastructure was not the only consideration, as these attacks affect vulnerabilities pertaining to federal information systems and any organization that acquires information systems. However, there were several laws that were passed in the congress after September 11 terrorist attacks. In the process, a series of homeland security presidential directives were issued for sustaining domestic security. However, on the other hand, despite an economic turmoil from September 11 attacks, the aviation industry continues to grow at a rapid pace and is considered as a fundamental transformation. Moreover, there is also a significant change for managing air traffic via net-centric approach. The acquisition of this change will replace the traditional approach for controlling air traffic that is constructed on Information t echnology solutions. By focusing on security, there is a significant increase in utilizing computerized systems onboard of an air carrier. Likewise, these systems facilitate high airborne and internally located system connectivity, operational and maintenance requirements. Moreover, the net-centric ATM connectivity raises concerns for cyber security threats and vulnerabilities. Propagation threats are critical because it is capable of rapidly broadcasting traffic on the Internet along with bypassing intrusion detection systems. Likewise, for augmenting the primary phase of work propagation, it uses a ‘hit list’ comprising of overflowed users i.e. users consuming heavy bandwidth. By identifying users, worm spreads itself at a rapid pace when compared to traditional spreading worms. Moreover, this type of attack saves a considerable amount of scanning time by only attacking a visible target. In the context of any cyber threat to an airport, the airport cannot be the prima ry target, as the Spanair flight JK5022 crash was successful by one of the contributions from a Malware. Vulnerabilities Existed in the System / Attack Methods Computer network intrusions are becoming very sophisticated and advanced and they have enforced a challenge for modern computer network based organizations. Likewise, a new class of challengers called now as ‘Advanced Persistent Threats’ (APT) demonstrates a well-planned and sponsored, highly skilled hackers targeting highly classified data for gaining competitive edge specifically in corporate businesses, law firms, military networks, national or international politics (Cole, 2012). Likewise, these highly skilled cyber criminals utilize sophisticated tools and methods that are constructed to disrupt computer network defense semantics without being detected. As per Mr. Mike Cloppert, is a Co-Chair of the cyber threat intelligent summit says that the cyber threat intelligence can facilitate organizations to mainta in an information classification and protection mechanism based on the priorities of these cyber criminals. As a result, the likelihood of success for these hackers will become low. Moreover, organizations can than plan accordingly for the targeted information and can counter these complex advanced persistent threats. Information security management team requires authentic and on time information for constantly monitoring new and potential threats and techniques. Likewise, exploiting the received information will improve a resilient defense posture of an organization. The number of RSA tokens implemented up till now exceeds 40 million and another 250 million are mobile software, as that leads the market for enabling

Big Data: Map Reduce Based Outlier Identification for Fraud

Big Data: Map Reduce Based Outlier Identification for Fraud Big Data: Fast, Parallel Map Reduce based outlier identification for Fraud and Intrusion Detection Pooja Vijay Pawar Ann Marie Joy Abstract One of the most challenging aspect of Big Data analytics is real time monitoring of data. Larger and larger amount of data is being collected and stored on a daily basis, thus increasing the need for quick, effective and efficient way of analysing the data in determining potential malicious data. Also network security threats are increasing at an alarming rate and are becoming increasingly sophisticated and difficult to detect. Web traffic generated by non-human activities such as botnets or worms consume network resources, delude people and affect network security. Most of the existing work in Fraud Detection/Intrusion Detection regard being an outlier as a binary property. In this paper we use a relative density based approach implemented as a MapReduce job, which gives a sense of degree of a data point being an outlier; this is more meaningful and also better immune to false positives. Keywords Big Data, Fraud detection, Intrusion Detection, Hadoop, Outlier, Cluster, Security, Relative Density, LOF 1. Introduction We are currently living in a world where we are surrounded and ruled by data. Continuously, exponentially huge amounts of data is collected, stored, processed and made available in a variety of forms every day. Recently, Network Intrusion and Fraud detection has received increased attention with regard to network security, mainly due to this. Big Data is drastically changing the way in which we detect fraud and intrusion in real time using advanced analytic solutions that are very powerful, complex and fast. In this paper, we propose a methodology to detect Fraudulent Web traffic and Intrusion in a network using MapReduce-based outlier detection. These features help in filtering out clients that generate abnormal traffic and specifically show different levels of potential anomalous traffic for each suspicious client. The detected abnormal web traffic can be visualized easily and this method can be implemented for large networks and can be scaled accordingly. Outlier can be defined as a data which is very distinct from the other data of the same dataset, based on some distance measure. Outlier detection, being a significant data mining problem has engendered a lot of research interest in the recent past. As a result, various methods for outlier detection have been developed particularly for dealing with numerical data. However, outlier detection for categorical data still remains an unexplored field. Addressing this requirement, we propose a two-phase algorithm for detecting outliers in categorical data based on a novel definition of outliers. This algorithm initially explores a clustering of the given data which is followed by the ranking phase for determining the set of most likely outliers. The proposed methodology is expected to show better results as it can identify different types of outliers, using independent ranking scheme based on the inherent clustering structure of the given data. Hadoop is a very popular open source Apache project, which is used for storing and processing huge volume of data on commodity hardware. Hadoop package mainly consists of MapReduce Engine and Hadoop File system. Many Frameworks have been built on top of Hadoop. Using the distributed architecture of Hadoop in this paper we discuss how we can exploit it for identifying outliers in captured network data. 2. Related Work There has been lot of research and number of techniques which have been developed in the past two decades with respect to fraud detection and Intrusion Detection. Lot of machine learning techniques such as Neural Networks, Markov model, K Nearest Neighbour have drawn special attention. In this paper we use unsupervised Machine Learning techniques to identify fraudulent transactions using Hadoop. Most current practices to the process of detecting intrusions exploit some form of rule-based study. Rule-based analysis depend on sets of predefined rules that are configured by an administrator and are automatically created by the system. The use of automated system techniques in intrusion detection mechanisms was a significant milestone in the development of effective and practical detection based information security systems. Rule-based systems suffer from an incompetence to detect attacks situations that may occur over an extended duration of time. However most significant benefit of neural networks in intrusion detection is the capability of the neural network to learn the characteristics of abnormal attacks and recognize instances that are unlike any which have been detected before by the network. Majority of studies that proposed Hidden Markov Model to implement IDS are related to host-based systems, i.e., IDS that analyses the actions performed on a single host to detect attempts of intrusion. 3. Outlier Detection Algorithms Outliers can be detected using various different techniques. Some of the techniques are discussed below 3.1 Distance-based and Clustering Approaches Distance-based methods do not make conventions for the data since they basically compute the distance between each point. For example, Knorr et al. Proposed a k-NN technique where, if m of the k nearest neighbours of a point are within a specific distance d, then the point can be classified as normal. Knorr et al. points as an outlier if at least p% of the points in the dataset lie more than distance 10 d from it. These methods show high computational complexity (e.g. nearest neighbour based methods have quadratic complexity with respect to the number of data points) which renders them impractical for really large datasets. Several approaches may be engaged to make the k-NN queries faster (to achieve linear or logarithmic time), such as an indexing structure (e.g. KD-tree, or X-tree); however these structures have been shown to break down as the dimensionality grows. Clustering can be defined as the task of grouping a set of objects in such a way that objects in the same group share some feature similarity among each other than to those in other groups. Clustering is one of the very popular techniques currently being used in outlier detection. Any object that has weak membership to the cluster it belongs to is a potential outlier. If there are any small clusters from other clusters, then the smaller cluster could potentially be an outlier. For instance there could be many different kinds of fraudulent transactions which might have high similarity among themselves and form a cluster. There are additional problems with clustering. Clustering algorithms are optimized to find clusters rather than outliers. Hence, sometimes it may be hard to tell whether a cluster belongs to fraudulent transactions or some new emergent buying behaviour of a legitimate user. Hence before making a final call we must perform additional analysis. 3.2 Statistical distribution Statistical outlier detection was one of the most basic approaches dating back to the 19th century. Multivariate statistical methods have been proposed, together with use of robust outlier’s estimates of the multidimensional distribution parameters, e.g. minimum covariance 9 determinant (MCD) and minimum volume ellipsoid (MVE). One critical problem of statistical-based methods is the suitable model for each dataset and application. Also, as data rises in dimensionality, it becomes ever more perplexing to estimate the multidimensional distribution. As the data increases in dimensionality, data ranges through a larger volume and becomes sparse. In addition to the reduction this has on performance, it also spreads the convex hull, thus altering the data distribution. This can be improved by pre selecting the most noteworthy features to work, projecting to a lower-dimensional subspace, or applying Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Another methodology to deal with higher dimensio nalities is to organize data points in convex hull layers according to their peeling depth, based on the idea that outliers are data objects with a shallow depth value. Fig 1 In this approach one main assumption is that data objects follows a certain distribution (E.g. Gaussian) and normal data objects occur in a high probability region of this model. Fig.1 shows an example where there is high concentration of data points lying in the normal region which associates to normal data points; the mini distributions on both sides of the normal distributions are possible outliers. As shown in Fig.1 outliers will deviate strongly from this distribution. There are lot of issues with this technique too, main being the curse of dimensionality, other being lack of robustness. This is because Mean and standard deviation are very sensitive to outliers. 3.3 Density Based approach In this technique we compare the density around a data point with the density around its local neighbours. The computed density is called an outlier score. The main assumption here is that the density around a normal data point is almost similar to the density around its local neighbours. Here Density/Outlier score means that some clusters are densely packed and some others are not. Mathematically, it is defined as the inverse of the average distance to the k nearest neighbours. Lower density of a data point signifies that the probability of it being an outlier is very high. There have been many variants of Density based approaches suggested in the past few decades, majority of which deal with decreasing the computational time complexity. In Fig.2 the points which are densely packed, appearing yellow indicate normal data points, the ones which are away from the cluster are outliers, possible candidates for malicious data. In this paper, we use this technique to determine possible candidates for outliers. 4. Experiment For our experiment we used KDD Cup 1999: Computer network intrusion detection dataset for testing and evaluating our approach. We used Relative Density [3] based approach for our system. Which involved 4 Map Reduce Tasks. The Algorithms works as follows: Computing K-NN [3] We begin with the notion of K-Nearest Neighbour of object p. Definition: K-Nearest Neighbour of object p For any positive integer k, the k-distance of object p, denoted as k-distance (p), is defined as the distance d(p,o) between p and an object o ∈ D such that: (i) For at least k objects o’∈D{p} it holds that d(p,o’) ≠¤ d(p,o), and (ii) For at most k-1 objects o’∈D{p} it holds that d(p,o’) . Given the k-distance of p, the k-distance neighbourhood of p contains every object whose distance from p is not greater than the k-distance, i.e. Nk-distance (p) (p) = { q ∈ D{p} | d(p, q) ≠¤ k- distance(p) } These objects q are called the k-nearest neighbours of p. We use 2 MapReduce tasks, one to compute the pairwise distance between data points as explained above and other to compute the density of the data point. The density of a data point is simply the inverse of the average distance to the k nearest neighbours. Finding all the neighbourhood group the data points are associated with and also give them unique id We define one more term reachability distance of an object p w.r.t the data point o to determine the neighbourhood. Definition: Reachability distance of an object p w.r.t. object or Let k be a natural number. The reachability distance of object p with respect to object o is defined as reach-distk(p, o) = max { k-distance(o), d(p, o) }. The higher the value of k, the more similar the reachability distances for objects within the same neighbourhood. We use the same MapReduce class as before with slightly different configuration to identify the neighbourhood. Once neighbourhood are identified they are given a unique ID. Using previous results, create a mapping between data point and its density. In a typical density-based clustering algorithm, there are two parameters that define the notion of density: (i) a parameter MinPts specifying a minimum number of objects; (ii) a parameter specifying a volume. These two parameters determine a density threshold for the clustering algorithms to operate. That is, objects or regions are connected if their neighbourhood densities exceed the given density threshold. To detect density based outliers, however, it is necessary to compare the densities of different sets of objects, which means that we have to determine the density of sets of objects dynamically. Therefore, we keep MinPts as the only parameter and use the values reach-distMinPts(p, o), for o ∈ NMinPts(p), as a measure of the volume to determine the density in the neighbourhood of an object p. Definition: Density of an object p lrdMinPts(p) = 1/ Intuitively, the local reachability density of an object p is the inverse of the average reachability distance based on the MinPts- nearest neighbours of p. Note that the local density can be ∞ if all the reachability distances in the summation are 0. This may occur for an object p if there are at least MinPts objects, different from p, but sharing the same spatial coordinates, i.e. if there are at least MinPts duplicates of p in the dataset. For simplicity, we will not handle this case explicitly but simply assume that there are no duplicates. Hence in our MapReduce implementation, first we sort the data points based on density data and the neighbourhood, such that in the input for the reducer, we get first value as density, and the subsequent values are the neighbourhood ids. Determining the Relative Density or LOF (Local Outlier Factor) Results from the previous step is then used in another MapReduce task to compute the relative density or also called as Local Outlier Factor (LOF). Definition: LOFMinPts(p) = The outlier factor of object p captures the degree to which we call p an outlier. It is the average of the ratio of the local reachability density of p and those of p’s MinPts-nearest neighbours. It is easy to see that the lower ps local reachability density is, and the higher the local reachability densities of ps MinPts-nearest neighbours are, the higher is the LOF value of p. In the following section, the formal properties of LOF are made precise. To simplify notation, we drop the subscript MinPts from reach-dist, lrd and LOF, if no confusion arises. Finally, Data Points which have low relative Density or LOF are determined as possible candidates for outliers. 5. Conclusion Existing Intrusion detection system are in nascent stage in handling extremely large traffic and the data transfers in large Networks. MapReduce Framework can handle large amount of data quickly and efficiently. Thus our proposed methodology for Outlier detection using Relative Density based approach not only can handle large amount of data but also scales easily. In near future full of MapReduce based IDS needs to developed and evaluated. We also plan to explore multiple classifier system compared to single classifier to get improved results. 6. Acknowledgement This work is supported by CSE Department, PES Institute of Technology. 7. References [1] Barnett, V., Lewis, T. (1995). Outliers in Statistical Data. Wiley, 3rd Edition. [2] Davide Ariu, Giorgio Giacinto, and Roberto Perdisci, Sensing attacks in Computers Networks with Hidden Markov Models. [3] Ng, Jorg Sander, Hans-Peter Kriegel, Raymond T, Markus M. Breunig. LOF: Identifying Density-Based Local Outliers [4] Manh Cong Tran, Lee Hee Jeong, Yasuhiro Nakamura. Abnormal Web Traffic Detection Using Connection Graph. [5] Suri, N.N.R.R. Centre for AI Robot., Bangalore, India Murty, M.N. ; Athithan, G..An algorithm for mining outliers in categorical data through ranking. [6] Kuo Zhao, Liang Hu. Intrusion Detection and Prevention in high speed network.[7] Qing He Yunlong Ma, Qun Wang, Fuzhen Zhuang, Zhongzhi Shi.Parallel Outlier Detection Using KD-Tree Based on MapReduce [8] Koufakou, A. Sch, FL Secretan, J., Reeder, J., Cardona, K., Georgiopoulos, M.Fast parallel outlier detection for categorical datasets using MapReduce. [9] Ganesh Ananthanarayanan, Srikanth Kandula, Albe rt Greenberg, Ion Stoica, Yi Lu, Bikas Saha, Edward Harris . Reining in the Outliers in Map-Reduce Clusters using Mantri. [10] H. GuÃÅ'ˆnes KayacÄ ±k, A. Nur Zincir-Heywood, Malcolm I. Heywood. Selecting Features for Intrusion Detection:A Feature Relevance Analysis on KDD 99 Intrusion Detection Datasets. [12] E. Eskin, A. Arnold, M. Prerau, L. Portnoy, S. Stolfo, â€Å"A geometric framework for unsupervised anomaly detection: Detecting intrusions in unlabeled data,† in Applications of Data Mining in Computer Security, Chapter 4, D. Barbara and S. Jajodia (editors), Kluwer. [13] Q. He, F.Z. Zhuang, J.C. Li, Z.Z. Shi. Parallel implementation of classification algorithms based on mapreduce. International Conference on Rough Set and Knowledge Technology. [15]Koufakou, A., Ortiz, E., Georgiopoulos, M., Anagnostopoulos, G., Reynolds, K., A Scalable and Efficient Outlier Detection Strategy for Categorical Data, Intl Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence ICTAI, October, 2007. [16] Big Data Analytics for Security Intelligence, CLOUD SECURITY ALLIANCE September 2013. [17] DuMouchel W., Schonlau M.: â€Å"A Fast Computer Intrusion Detection Algorithm based on Hypothesis Testing of Command Transition Probabilities†, Proc. 4th Int. Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, New York, NY, AAAI Press, 1998, pp. 189-193. [18] Ramaswamy S., Rastogi R., Kyuseok S.: â€Å"Efficient Algorithms for Mining Outliers from Large Data Sets†, Proc. ACM SIDMOD Int. Conf. on Management of Data, 2000. [19] Fawcett T., Provost F.: â€Å"Adaptive Fraud Detection†, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Journal, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1997, pp. 291-316. [20] Holtz, Marcelo D., Bernardo M. David, and Rafael Timà ³teo de Sousa Jà ºnior. Building Scalable Distributed Intrusion Detection Systems Based on the MapReduce Framework. Telecomunicacoes (Santa Rita do Sapucai) 13 (2011): 22-31. [21] DuMouchel W., Schonlau M.:  "A Fast Computer Intrusion Detection Algorithm based on Hypothesis Testing of Command Transition Probabilities†, Proc. 4th Int. Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, New York, NY, AAAI Press, 1998, pp. 189-193. 1 Onida Electronics: New Product Launch Onida Electronics: New Product Launch LAUNCHING OF A NEW PRODUCT ONIDA LAPTOPS COMPANY DESCRIPTION ONIDA is one of the largest television manufacturing companies in INDIA. It is one of the largest and rapid growing companies in the same field. Onida as a company was founded in 1981 as a public company. Its head quarter is in MUMBAI, MAHARASHTRA, INDIA. Onida deals in a type of industry known as electronic industry. Onida Company started their business with electronics and then expanded their business with various products as LCD TVS, PLASMA TVS, TELEVISIONS, DVD AND HOME THREATER SYSTEM, AIR CONDITIONERS, WASHING MACHINES, MICROWAVES, PRODUCTS RELATED TO PRESENTATION, and INVERTERS AND ALSO MOBILE PHONES. Onida Company is a most popular brand now. It has got his network as 33 branch offices and 208 customer relation centers. Also the company is having 41 depots spread all over the country. Onida is also having a market capitalization of 400 crore approx. also onida electronics won an award as AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN ELECTRONICS in 1999 from MINISTRY OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, GOVERNMENT OF INDIA. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Onida is one of the largest rapid growing companies. It is one of the most successful companies in term of professionalism. The main objective is to prove quality of competitive prices and customer satisfaction. It is one of the objective is to provide NOTEBOOK PC as ensured quality, availability and customer satisfaction. This following marketing plan forms the basis for the launching of ONIDA LAPTOPS by ONIDA COMPANY one of the famous company in India. The analysis will allow us to follow for the achievement of the companys strategic goals. ONIDA LAPTOPS will be marketed to reinforce the companys status as leader in innovation and successful product launching. This new product launching will enable us to add RS.100 crores to companys turnover with a forecasted sales growth prospect of 10-15% over the next 5 years. And while satisfying the need and designing the product to match individuals lifestyle. Success will be reflected by a sizeable capture of market shares within this market, while strategically carrying the company up to the top spot as the market leader in laptop segment. Export potentials in the market will be considered in all the western countries as USA, Russia, France, and Iraq. Nigeria, Yemen and even further expansion can be planed. The main aim of the company is to attract a sizeable market share of the laptop segment. Also the number of customers depending upon laptops rather than personal computers is taken care off. The main aim is to sell one lakh units of laptops in the first year considering as this brand as a new brand and being expertise in the related field having manufactured the product for several brands and having also sold its own televisions. EXPECTED TURNOVER Above chart shows the expected turnovers in crores over the coming years in turnover of onida laptops in various countries. In 2009 as the product is being launching in 2009 only so started expected turnover will be near about 90 lakhs. With the continuous supply of good quality and good work with good customer service expected turnover will start increasing. Company is planning to use new technology and other servicer beneficial for customers and company in terms of turnover which will help in increase the expected turnover to 150 lakhs in 2012. This proves that launching of onida laptops will be beneficial for the organization. SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS ONIDA NOTEBOOK PC is a new expansion line of onida. Onida television portfolio has been well received and now ONIDA NOTEBOOK PC is going to be launched for onidas continues success and future profitability. Onida as a company is famous for quality products at reasonable prices and it offer best facilities. It will offer NOTEBOOK PC or LAPTOPS in various configuration as well as prices to satisfy every kind of customer. One important key to success or for the development of the product is to create product awareness and growth of customer base. MARKETING SUMMARY Marketing summary of onida laptops possess sufficient information about the market needs and customer needs, wants, desires and demands. It will also help to give right offer to right customer so that company can achieve customer satisfaction and can communicate with them in a better way. Also this lead to have some important information about customer which will help to make customer a delightful customer. TARGET MARKET The target market of ONIDA LAPTOPS or NOTEBOOK PC is shown below: Above shows that there is a target market of onida laptops as CORPORATE USERS END USERS OTHERS Environmental analysis Macro environmental factors Growing disposable income and low penetration levels would ensure greater share of wallet for the consumer industry and would help in achieving the predetermined targets. The inventions and innovations would help in shaping the industrys future. It would be necessary to catch the changing trends in consumer lifestyles and offer the right product at right time to facilitate further growth and achievement of targets. There is a need to launch a product which will give maximum customer satisfaction and satisfy there needs. Micro environmental factors The cost would further come down with enhanced possibilities of better and easy cross border talks with suppliers worldwide and the range of offerings Would go up. With the increase in number of players, there would be more action and the industry would feel the buzz around it and would need constant high pitch communication with the customers. Network has a strong influence on the buying decision and the organization that would manage the channel better, would have a substantial edge over the others. Competitive Strategy Onida will try to offer more valuable offerings to the customers and would try to manage customer relationships. Onida as a company in order to be effective and ahead of competition would try to maximize benefits to the consumers. They will also react strongly to price changes made by the competitors and organizations would look at integration on backend as well as the front ends. MARKET DEMOGRAPHICS The profile of ONDA NOTEBOOK PC or LAPTOPS customer consists of the following GEOGRAPHIES, DEMOGRAPHICS, and BEHAVIOR FACTOR: GEOGRAPHICAL FACTORS Geographical factors have been classified as: ONIDA NOTEBOOK will have specific domestic geographic target area. They will serve the product to domestic market. Onida will try to cover the Metropolitan area through their own distribution channel. DEMOGRAPHICAL FACTORS Demographical factors have been classified on the basis of the following attributes: There will be almost same featured notebook pc or laptop for the corporate, end users and other users. University teachers and other researchers can use it for their research work and analyzing the environment. High, Middle, Upper middle and middle class use it and reasonable pricing strategy will help to purchase of these notebook pc by every potential users. BEHAVIOUR FACTORS Its a general behavior of every human that NOTEBOOK PC or LAPTOP increases the status and prestige of the user. In todays busy world there is need of a product which is available with consumer anywhere or any time and at every period of time. Customer feel that they have a separate image and prestige by using ONIDA LAPTOPS. MARKET NEED FOR ONIDA LAPTOPS ONDA LAPTOPS will provides its customers the opportunity to choose NOTEBOOKs with different configuration and varieties.These laptops will also fulfill the requirements of customers and also provide benefit as:- Reasonable pricing Consumer needs a high quality product at reasonable price, for that reason ONIDA try to provide high quality product at a reasonable price. So that more and more customer can be attracted towards onida notebook pc. High quality Consumer want high quality product, which is must be high in regard to performance. ONIDA tried to meet this need of consumer at its level best. Quality was the main point to be taken care of by the company as this the main motto of company. Different varieties Choices of customer vary from person to person .So ONIDA provides different laptop with different features. And provide laptops with different configuration. Product availability One of the important things to be taken care of is Customer and customer seeking availability of product so that they can buy the product at any time they need. MARKET TRENDS ONIDA will produce different type of laptop which not only fulfill quality demand of customer but also reasonable price. So that more and more customer will purchase these laptops. Now a days NOTEBOOK PC production company is growing and more competitors are coming in the market. Now even customer are more aware about the product for that reason they want different types of product with different features and different styling features. The market for LAPTOPS with new and new technologies is growing faster, competition are increasing in these markets. Thus, ONIDA made segments for their product. They divided their customer in to three groups, and give emphasis on each of the group. So that company can capture all kind of customers in market. MARKET GROWTH Gradually total ONIDA Company is going upward with a strong competition. With the increase in domestic market, our international market growth statistics is increasing day by day. Now with the launch of new laptops with newer technology the market share of our company is going to increase further. COMPETITIVE STRATEGIES Onida will try to offer more value offerings to the customers and would try to manage CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP. The firms in order to be effective and ahead of competition would try to maximize benefits to the consumers. Firms would react strongly to price changes made by the COMPETITORS and organizations would look at INTEGRATION on BACKEND as well as the FRONTENDS. CURRENT MARKET SITUATION OF LAPTOP MARKET Market Overview Luxury goods are now being perceived as necessities as now customers are having higher disposable incomes being spent on lifestyle products. There is a discernible shift in the consumers preference in favor of higher-end, technologically superior branded products, the demand being spurred by increasing consumer awareness and preference for new models now the modern educated customer is not confined to old technologies and old products. Now customers want to try newer products with newer technologies. Quality products with superior technology and technology up gradation have helped the industry to achieve higher growth in terms of volume and also higher realization in value terms. Rate of growth in production has been more in terms of quantity or in volume growth rather than the growth in value terms for a number of products. This has happened because of constantly falling prices over the years due to competition among the MAJOR PLAYERS, AGGRESSIVE MARKETING STRATEGIES AND DECLINING IMPORT TARIFFS. Competition has forced companies to offer efficient AFTER SALE SERVICE and support and this, in turn, has swayed customer preference for good brands. There are positive growth trends in Technological goods segments white goods and consumer electronics during and points to sustained growth because of emerging opportunities and strong fundamentals of the economy. Because of growth in production in the organized segment and domestic availability of branded products due to lowering of import duties and other liberal measures, the share of unorganized segment has come down sharply to only 8 to 10 per cent from 40 to 50 percent. The price difference between branded and unbranded goods has narrowed down and with branded players providing good after sales services and support consumer prefers to buy branded products. The industry related to technology appears to have two clearly differentiated segments. The MNCs have an edge over their Indian counterparts in terms of technology combined with a steady flow of capital. The domestic companies compete on the basis of their well-acknowledged brands, an extensive distribution network and an insight into local market conditions. Competitive strategies revolve around strong brand differentiation and prices. Bargaining power of customers is high due to availability of many brands. Demand is Cyclical and seasonal. Demand is high generally on the basis of requirement of customers as corporate customer or end user. Demand for technology is present throughout the year. There is no preference on the basis of any special month when demand for technology is more in one month than other month. Rural India which accounts for nearly 70% of the total number of households, offers plenty of scope and opportunities for the white goods industry. Increasing consumer awareness and preference for new models have added to the demand in rural areas also. And evolution of education had made more and more people rely on technology. Attractive consumer loan schemes with reduced interest rates over the years by the financial institutions and commercial banks and the hire-purchase schemes have added to the surge in demand. Besides, the consumer goods companies are themselves coming out with attractive financing schemes to consumers through their extensive dealer network. The usage of internet by the market functionaries has lead to intelligence sales of the products. It has helped sustain the demand boom witnessed recently in this sector. SWOT ANALYSIS (STRENGTHS, WEAKNESSES, OPPORTUNITIES, THREATS) STRENGTHS Quality product and services. Popular brand name. Continuous research and development Strong existing distribution channel. Increased share of organized sector as compare to unorganized sector. Attractive design. Body made of silver and plastic and available in many colors. Most of the buyers are satisfied. Presence of established distribution networks in both urban and rural areas. WEAKNESSES Poor government spending in infrastructure and other related things. Lack of promotional activities by companies. Low purchasing power of consumers Insufficient capital. Legal and political barrier regarding import, tax and shipment and other difficulties. Difficulties due to competitors. Old technologies. OPPURTUNITIES Low penetration levels Demand of NOTEBOOK PC is increasing. Improved market portfolio. Greater demand due to changing lifestyles Increasing sales throughout the country and internationally. Availability of easy finance. Promotional activities to increase brand image. Growing disposable income of consumers Increasing demand in rural sector. THREATS Strong competitors Legal political difficulties regarding import duty, tax etc. Entrance of new competitors in the market. The price of NOTEBOOK or laptops is decreasing continuously. Cheap Imports from Singapore, China and other Asian countries Higher import duties on raw materials imposed in the Budget 2008-09. COMPETITORS Onida has established its own market. But still they have to face the competitors. Some of the major competitors of onida laptops are: HP: HPs NOTEBOOK is having maximum market share in capturing the market of NOTEBOOK PC in India as well as internationally. HPS notebooks are produced in China. They are holding a leading position for long time in NOTEBOOK PC in our country. ACER: Acer is the Chinese producer of NOTEBOOK or laptops. ACER has its maximum market share of NOTEBOOK PC in Bangladesh. They have fewer shares in Indian market as compare to acre. COMPAQ: Mitsubishi is Taiwan Company. COMPAQ was an automobile company initially. Now it is producing NOTEBOOK PC also. It is now giving a strong competition to notebook or laptop market. DELL: Firstly they produce televisions. But now they have enhances its business by producing NOTEBOOK PC. And DELL is now giving a strong competition in laptop market as well as technological market. MARKET SHARE OF ONIDA PRODUCT OFFERING ONIDA will offers different type of configuration at different price to our consumer for chooses their expected product. Following are the items:- POINTS OF SUCESS Strong quality Better customer relationship management Better service Operational efficiency and integration Effective channel management Constant product change and product mix management Image of brand and product Distribution channel Retention of customer MARKETING STRATEGIES Marketing strategies are helpful in creating awareness, interest and appeal from our target market. So that more and more market can be capture. Basically marketing strategy is based on superior performance of the following areas: Different configuration. Product quality. Delight user. MISSION The main mission is to provide quality and product at a competitive price. Growth in diversity and continuous contribute to the growth is being the main market challenger. Also To benefit society at large through Innovation, Quality, Productivity, Human Development and Growth, and to generate sustained surpluses, always striving for excellence, within the framework of law, and in nothing but the truth in which we base every action 3.2 Marketing Objective Capture the market as a market leader. To attain quantitative and qualitative leadership in the technological sector. Maintaining positive and increased sales growth than the competitor. Increase the market share by market development and services. To increase product awareness and sales by persuasive promotional activities. Becoming a globally recognized and prestigious company through synergistic business investment. Differentiation through innovation and passion through empowerment. Also cost through economies of scale and world class systems and procedures that bring in delight of stakeholders. FINANCIAL OBJECTIVE The company aims to sell one lakh units of NOTEBOOKS in first year of its launching and is expecting a target turnover of Rs.100 Crores from laptop market in first year. It expects to grow at 10-15% in next five years by satisfying customer needs through its offerings. They aim to make considerable profits and achieve economies through backend and front end integration. And maintaining double digit each year. STP (SEGMENTATION, TARGETING, POSITIONING) SEGMENTATION OF MARKET The company has segmented its target market on the basis of incomes and lifestyles. People who are well educated, have lifestyle as an important element and have high income can buy laptop. TARGET MARKET The potential consumers are separated into various segments- Corporate User End User and others. The primary marketing opportunity is sell laptops to these well defined, accessible target market segments. Corporate User: Corporate users are the users who buy the laptops for their official purpose only. The MD, GM, DGM, CEO and other. Levels in offices are the main corporate users. End User: End users are the users who buy the laptops for their personal use. Teachers, Students of private University, businessman etc are mainly consider as the End users. Others: other then as mention above. POSITIONING IN MARKET Onida is trying to maintain its position as a NOTEBOOK company. The position will be achieved by providing quality product, competitive price, and according to consumers demand and by delighting consumers. There should be experienced managers to make awareness about the product to customer. Company is also promising to offer quality offerings and better services and make a satisfied consumer as its brand ambassador. The companys will advertise its product as the synonym of truth and providing it at a reasonable price. STRATEGIES ONIDAS main primary marketing strategy is to seek and firstly create customer awareness regarding the products as well as availability of product. Other marketing strategy are- Providing Total Quality Management (TQM) Customer Orientation Providing international standard products To increase the product line as well as length as per the expectations of the consumers Competitive prices of product. MARKETING MIX ONIDAS marketing mix is comprised of the following approaches to product, price, promotion, and place or customer service. PRODUCT o BRAND NAME The name of the brand is ONIDA NOTEBOOKS. o PPRDUCT CLASSIFICATION ONIDA NOTEBOOK has five types of product. These are-W125U-T3000, W3001U-T4150, W4200-T4500, W4510U, W5520U o QUALITY OF PRODUCT ONIDA is mainly popular for the maintaining of high quality of its products. Total Quality Management (TQM) is purely practiced here. o DESIGN Attractive Design, Color, configuration, Comfortable weight. o PACKING ONIDA supply the notebooks to the users with attractive packaging. It provides special cartoon with strong handling of the NOTEBOOKs to its dealers. o Size The products size vary from to one product series to other product series o Service ONIDA provides best after sales service and take feedback for its products. PROMOTION o SALES PROMOTION ONIDA provide initially shot-term incentives to encourage and purchase or sale of its products. Occasionally company has decided to give special discounted price for its products. Company also decided to give T-shirts, caps, bags etc. to lure the customers. o ADVERTISEMENT Company decided to gives advertisement for ONIDA NOTEBOOK through newspaper, billboard, popular magazine, leaflets, sponsoring on game competition, internet etc. o PERSONAL SELLING ONIDA company is also deciding to sell laptops through personal selling but till now we havent arrange any kind personal selling. PRICE o LIST PRICING Pricing of the product are being made on the basis of technology used in the product and depending upon the various series of onida. The various pricing of various varieties of laptops are: o DISCOUNT Company has decided to allow discount facilities to all the retailers and dealers. o Payment period ONIDA will sell NOTEBOOK on credit to its distributor and retailers and after the sale e period of 2 months can be given for making payment. PLACE CHANNELS ONIDA has its own distribution channel for the distribution of their products. DISTRIBUTOR ONIDA have own distribution channel for distributing their products. Location ONIDA covers district areas of our country to capture the market for their products. TRANSPORTION FACILITIES ONIDA has its own transportation facility for its distributors. Distributors are themselves responsible for taking the products to their showrooms. MARKETING RESEARCH One of the important things is research work. Research is very vital for any company to know about current market position and also to predict future needs. Information is collected through the dealer and retailer. o Question How did you hear about our ONIDA NOTEBOOK product? note the answer and this answer can be use for the promotional activities. o Customer suggestion New feedback service and customers suggestions system to gain additional information. They want to know from the customers about- à ¼ What suggestion do you want to give to company to improve our product? à ¼ Why do you need a laptop and why onida laptop only? FINANCIALS It is very important while the launching of a product to take care of the financial overview of ONIDA NOTEBOOK related to marketing activities. ONIDA address brake even analysis (BEA), sales forecast, expense forecast, and showed how this activity are link to the marketing activity. BREAK EVEN ANALYSIS Break even is a point where cost is equals to sales. The break-even analysis below shows the number of single sales, or units, that we must realize to break-even. Analysis of breakeven point is based on the cost and the sales of a company. SALES FORECAST: Sales forecast means planning or estimation of sales so that future sales can be assessed. ONIDA thinks that the sales forecast will be achieve into the five main streams; W1250U-T3000, W3001U-T4150, W4200U-T4500, W4510U and W5520U. This will steadily increase the sales. As the advertising budget allows the target market forecast, the listed of all the potential customers get divided into separate groups. The forecasted customers group divided into various categories: Corporate Users, End Users and others. EXPENSE FORECAST Every company has to make a prior forecast of expenses. It is important to mark such forecast to limit the expenses made in future. These expenses are to be budgeted at approximately 5% of total sales for 2007-08 and 6% for 2008-09. Mainly expenses are to be tracked in the major marketing categories as:-NEWSPAPER ADVERTISEMENT, PROMOTIONAL EVENTS, BILLBOARDS, PRINTED LEAFLETS, and ADVERTISEMENT IN TELEVISIONS ETC. CONTROLING FACTORS The main purpose of ONIDA NOTEBOOKs marketing plan is to serve as a guide for the organization while launching of the laptops successfully. This plan is all about implementation and changing the business and also to make it better. In this marketing plan we look at specific implementation programs, and the details that it takes to make it happen. The following are the areas which will be specially monitored to enhance the performance of company and launching of laptops. Contingency Planning Contingencies likely to arise: Price War New Technologies in the market More Competitors Companys Strategy to counter the same: Creating value preposition Continuous innovation and product development Creating distinct brand identity