Absenteeism Problems And Costs: Causes, Effects And Cures

Employee absences are both costly and disruptive for business, and the trend has been increasing steadily over the years.  Personal illness and family issues are cited as the primary reason for unplanned absences. Employers have been attempting to determine the validity of these illnesses and offer incentives and propose possible solutions to mitigate these absences, including those caused by family issues.  Illness, family responsibilities, personal issues and stress all take a toll on the worker which in turn affects morale, absences and productivity in the workplace.   Some sources including Statistics Canada cite that absenteeism approximates 15-20 percent of payroll (direct and indirect) costs.  This is significant.   Canada Newswire stated on May 23, 2008 that absenteeism translates into losses of over $16 billion in salary expenses.  The purpose of this paper is to identify the leading factors of absenteeism, possible “cures” that exist for these factors, and present results of companies that have implemented programs to combat the problem of absenteeism.  It is important that businesses determine if they in fact have an absenteeism problem and thus consider utilizing some of the proposed solutions offered in this paper

Feedback in the ERP value-chain: what influence has thoughts about competitive advantage

Different opinions about whether an organization gains a competitive advantage (CA) from an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system exist. However, this paper describes another angle of the much reported competitive advantage discussion. The basic question in the paper concerns how thoughts about receiving competitive advantage from customizing ERPs influences feedback in ERP development. ERP development is described as having three stakeholders: an ERP vendor, an ERP partner or re-seller, and the ERP end-user or client. The question asked is: What influence has thoughts about receiving competitive advantage on the feedback related to requirements in ERP development? From a set of theoretical propositions eight scenarios are proposed. These scenarios are then illustrated from interviews with stakeholders in ERP development. From an initial research, evidence for six of these eight scenarios was uncovered. The main conclusion is that thoughts about competitive advantage seem to influence the feedback, but not really in the way that was initial assumed. Instead of, as was assumed, having a restrict view of providing feedback stakeholders seems to be more interested in having a working feedback loop in the ERP value-chain making the parties in a specific value-chain more interested in competing with other parties in other ERP valuechains