Hovey Insurance and Financial Services - Research Paper Example

? Hovey Insurance & Financial Services Challenges facing the implementation of the plan Hovey Insurance & Financial Services faces a number of challenges in the implementation plan for the website project. For successful implementation of this project, the company has to devise ways and means of solving these problems. One of the biggest challenges facing the company is a constrained budget. Funds are an important tool when implementing any type of business plan. Among the various uses of funds in a firm, are payments for consultancy fees, settling wages for the website developers, marketing fees as well as miscellaneous expenses. If these fees are unsuccessful, the organization cannot successfully move the project to the completion stage. The dynamism with which the business environment is changing with constrains all organizations in business. In the current business environment, few organizations have surplus resources. If anything, they struggle with the limited resources and tight budgets to realize their objectives. Hovey Insurance & Financial Services Company, being part of this environment, has to contend with the high competition levels and low budgets. This at times bends the organization to opt for the lowest bidder while seeking the right people to deal with in the development process. Low bidders mean that the organization cannot afford the best brains, the most knowledgeable and the most experienced specialists in the market. Subsequently, the quality of products may not meet the expectations of the planners while it may take a longer time before completing. Lack of information technology is yet another problem facing the company. In the current business environment, technology plays a crucial role in the success of the business. Currently, most of the organizations have computerized their operations to suit the global demands and quality requirements of goods and products. For high quality products and services, companies have to give priority to technological investments. Companies operate on a global competitive platform, where customers have unlimited choices of goods and services. Increasingly, more organizations are investing in technology to have the upper hand in the market. Most aim at having long-term benefits from technological investment. Although the initial capital investment by a company in technology is high, there are numerous long-term benefits accrued. Companies save on time taken in producing goods while service industry firms gain more from customer loyalty resultant from high quality services. These are the missing factors in Hovey Insurance & Financial Services since the company has low technological investment capacity. While developing the company’s website, the company faced a myriad of problems. There was an acute shortage of technology in the country during the developmental stages of the website. This poses even a bigger problem to Hovey Insurance & Financial Services as monitoring of the trends and the traffic of people visiting the site will be a problem. This might mean additional costs to the firm as it may frequently need to outsource these services to an external provider. This poses a dual problem to the organization. On one hand, the organization suffers the problem of secrecy and autonomy as it has to allow inside information to the public. This could have devastating effects on the organization as the contracted person may decide to trade the information with the organization’s competitors. On the other hand, the quality of services provided may be compromising against the high costs charged by the provider. This problem even gets worse when the organization factors in its constrained budget. Time is essential in completing high quality work or when providing high quality services to the customers. While developing a project, the planners and implementers allow enough time to plan the project, get it on its feet and help it start running. It also allows for any changes whenever a problem arises in the implementation of the project. Workers, on the other hand, do not rush with the implantation process of the plan, thus guaranteeing quality work and services. They do their best for the project, taking time to review the work done by the developers. JM Hovey Ltd faces the problem of inadequate time in the implementation of this project. The duration for the completion of the project is eight weeks. Normally, to complete such a project takes close to twelve weeks with an allowance of one week for lateness. This means that we are short of time. Therefore, we have to rush through the project to ensure that we manage to finish it in time immediately. The website developers, therefore, are working under pressure to meet the deadline. With hopes of doing further business with the company in future, developers have to increase their costs of delivering this project. However, if they do not intend to do further business with the company in future, the organization opts to compromise the quality of product provided to the company to deliver by the required time. Research and development are important components in the success of any organization. Research helps in identifying the kind of products that have a high appeal to the customers. Research also aims at finding ways of solving problems facing the organization. Through research, an organization provides the best quality of products to its customers. This increases revenues for the company and the general profitability levels. After completing their research, the research team handles over the report to the product development team for implementation. This reduces the issues affecting the organization and its profitability. The organization can achieve numerous savings through a well-functioning research and development team. The management should invest in developing this department. However, JM Hovey Ltd lacks a well-organized and fully equipped research and development department. They lack the capacity to carry out an extensive research on the best products in the market. The organization did not have this capacity, and thus, it took it a lot of time while researching on the most efficient website to use in its marketing strategy. The campaign plan Hovey Insurance & Financial Services plans to market the website in a number of ways and exploit a number of options available at its disposal. The biggest consideration is the availability of funds for investment. Faced with a constrained budget and low technological investment, the firm has a limited number of options available for exploitation. This is because it has to rely on the cheapest methods of campaigning that are available for the organization. Since the firm does not use the recent technology, it cannot use the modern methods of internet marketing and creating a social media campaign. Instead, it can only use the traditional methods available for its campaign. However, it hopes to take its campaign to the digital platform in future after the success of the website. Currently, Hovey Insurance & Financial Services plans to use flyers as its main campaign tool for the new web site. The firm plans to distribute these flyers in public places such as Sussex and Saint John. This helps in creating awareness about the website among the people at a limited cost. Moreover, it reduces the costs involved in the entire process, as it requires a few people to carry out the whole plan. Due to the high number of people visiting these places, the firm hopes to capture and tap into this population to market its idea. This method of the campaign has a proven record of success and effectiveness in sending the intended message to the people. However, one disadvantage of this method is that it draws less attention to the intended customers. The use of flyers is less effective when compared to other online marketing options such as Facebook and Twitter. Few people will even bother to search online for the company’s website. Hovey does not have a database of its current customers. If the firm had a database of its customers, the campaign would be easier. This is because the company would use the customer’s contacts to create an awareness campaign for the website. However, this is not the case currently facing the firm as it has to rely on customers in real life to wage its campaign. Read More

 

Read More