Have you got sensitive skin? Sensitive skin care is an issue for some of us, not for others. But for people with sensitive skin it can be a major issue.Problems for people with sensitive skin include redness, blotchiness, swelling, rashes, dry skin, tightness and general skin irritation. Sensitive skin can be a problem for those with different skin types, including those with oily skin.Here’s 5 things that you should be doing for optimum sensitive skin care.1. Have an allergy test. There are various allergies that cause skin problems and it always pays to see if you can work out a specific skin problem. If you can determine exactly what is causing the problem it may, (or may not), be possible to do something about it.2. Avoid big name skin care products. The big brand name skin care products are littered with ingredients that can cause those with sensitive skin types to have problems. Unfortunately the FDA doesn’t really regulate the ingredients put into skin care products and many of them contain ingredients that are suspected or known to cause cancer and other conditions, including causing skin problems.It’s ironic that many brands of anti aging and skin care products actually create skin problems, and other health problems. Your skin doesn’t like artificial chemicals, and many people will find the result is skin reactions of various types.One example for you to think about. There is a range of common chemicals caused parabens that are used widely in big brand name skin care products as preservatives. Parabens are listed in the cosmetic database as dangerous, two in particular as a high hazard of at least 7 or 8 on a scale of 1 – 10.Parabens could themselves be causing skin problems, and this is just one example. There are many many ingredients like this used in skin care products that may be causing otherwise healthy skin to become sensitive.3. And it’s exactly the same with cosmetics. Here’s an example. Recent tests showed lead in over 50% of the big brand name lipsticks including some brands that you may well be using now. Avoid big brand cosmetics.And an allergy test may well establish that you have an allergy to one or more of the ingredients in your cosmetics or skin care and anti aging products.For those requiring high quality sensitive skin care avoiding big brand cosmetics and skin care may well, of itself, be sufficient to reverse their skin problems.4. Use low irritant detergents when washing your clothes and other household items. Laundry detergents can also cause skin problems, for those with sensitive skin and also for those with normal healthy skin. For example if you wash your pillow cases and sheets in a laundry detergent that itself has allergens or skin irritants then spend 8 hours with your face lying on that pillow case that itself can cause problems.And avoid anything, including detergents, with fragrances. This includes cosmetics and skin care products. Fragrances, unfortunately, also have their problems. Fragrances are chemicals and can cause skin problems just like some of the other nasty, (and unregulated) ingredients in big name skin care and cosmetic products.5. Find some natural cosmetics and skin care and anti aging products to use.There are excellent natural cosmetics and skin care products available. They are made by small niche companies that are not household names. These companies have a commitment to making high quality skin care and anti aging products and cosmetics that are perfect for optimum sensitive skin care. Usually they are highly price competitive because these companies don’t spend up big on TV advertising.And usually the products will do what they say they will, contrary to those big brand name products that you see on the shelves of your department stores, which should be avoided.Their products are made with naturally occurring plant ingredients known to be safe and non allergenic, and these companies have as much commitment to safety as the quality of their products. And their skin care products for sensitive skin are perfect for those with skin issues.For people with sensitive skin good skin health is a serious issue. Apart from the unsightliness of the redness and dryness, the irritation and itching can drive you mad. Sensitive skin care is a big issue for those people.So if you experience serious skin problems there’s 5 things you can do to start reversing the problem. Do all these things and you may well find that the skin problems you are having just disappear. It isn’t guaranteed of course, but that’s the best place to start for optimum sensitive skin care.
Best in Class Finance Functions For Police Forces
Background
Police funding has risen by £4.8 billion and 77 per cent (39 per cent in real terms) since 1997. However the days where forces have enjoyed such levels of funding are over.
Chief Constables and senior management recognize that the annual cycle of looking for efficiencies year-on-year is not sustainable, and will not address the cash shortfall in years to come.
Facing slower funding growth and real cash deficits in their budgets, the Police Service must adopt innovative strategies which generate the productivity and efficiency gains needed to deliver high quality policing to the public.
The step-change in performance required to meet this challenge will only be achieved if the police service fully embraces effective resource management and makes efficient and productive use of its technology, partnerships and people.
The finance function has an essential role to play in addressing these challenges and supporting Forces’ objectives economically and efficiently.
Challenge
Police Forces tend to nurture a divisional and departmental culture rather than a corporate one, with individual procurement activities that do not exploit economies of scale. This is in part the result of over a decade of devolving functions from the center to the.divisions.
In order to reduce costs, improve efficiency and mitigate against the threat of “top down” mandatory, centrally-driven initiatives, Police Forces need to set up a corporate back office and induce behavioral change. This change must involve compliance with a corporate culture rather than a series of silos running through the organization.
Developing a Best in Class Finance Function
Traditionally finance functions within Police Forces have focused on transactional processing with only limited support for management information and business decision support. With a renewed focus on efficiencies, there is now a pressing need for finance departments to transform in order to add greater value to the force but with minimal costs.
1) Aligning to Force Strategy
As Police Forces need finance to function, it is imperative that finance and operations are closely aligned. This collaboration can be very powerful and help deliver significant improvements to a Force, but in order to achieve this model, there are many barriers to overcome. Finance Directors must look at whether their Force is ready for this collaboration, but more importantly, they must consider whether the Force itself can survive without it.
Finance requires a clear vision that centers around its role as a balanced business partner. However to achieve this vision a huge effort is required from the bottom up to understand the significant complexity in underlying systems and processes and to devise a way forward that can work for that particular organization.
The success of any change management program is dependent on its execution. Change is difficult and costly to execute correctly, and often, Police Forces lack the relevant experience to achieve such change. Although finance directors are required to hold appropriate professional qualifications (as opposed to being former police officers as was the case a few years ago) many have progressed within the Public Sector with limited opportunities for learning from and interaction with best in class methodologies. In addition cultural issues around self-preservation can present barriers to change.
Whilst it is relatively easy to get the message of finance transformation across, securing commitment to embark on bold change can be tough. Business cases often lack the quality required to drive through change and even where they are of exceptional quality senior police officers often lack the commercial awareness to trust them.
2) Supporting Force Decisions
Many Finance Directors are keen to develop their finance functions. The challenge they face is convincing the rest of the Force that the finance function can add value – by devoting more time and effort to financial analysis and providing senior management with the tools to understand the financial implications of major strategic decisions.
Maintaining Financial Controls and Managing Risk
Sarbanes Oxley, International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), Basel II and Individual Capital Assessments (ICA) have all put financial controls and reporting under the spotlight in the private sector. This in turn is increasing the spotlight on financial controls in the public sector.
A ‘Best in Class’ Police Force finance function will not just have the minimum controls to meet the regulatory requirements but will evaluate how the legislation and regulations that the finance function are required to comply with, can be leveraged to provide value to the organization. Providing strategic information that will enable the force to meet its objectives is a key task for a leading finance function.
3) Value to the Force
The drive for development over the last decade or so, has moved decision making to the Divisions and has led to an increase in costs in the finance function. Through utilizing a number of initiatives in a program of transformation, a Force can leverage up to 40% of savings on the cost of finance together with improving the responsiveness of finance teams and the quality of financial information. These initiatives include:
Centralization
By centralizing the finance function, a Police Force can create centers of excellence where industry best practice can be developed and shared. This will not only re-empower the department, creating greater independence and objectivity in assessing projects and performance, but also lead to more consistent management information and a higher degree of control. A Police Force can also develop a business partner group to act as strategic liaisons to departments and divisions. The business partners would, for example, advise on how the departmental and divisional commanders can meet the budget in future months instead of merely advising that the budget has been missed for the previous month.
With the mundane number crunching being performed in a shared service center, finance professionals will find they now have time to act as business partners to divisions and departments and focus on the strategic issues.
The cultural impact on the departments and divisional commanders should not be underestimated. Commanders will be concerned that:
o Their budgets will be centralized
o Workloads would increase
o There will be limited access to finance individuals
o There will not be on site support
However, if the centralized shared service center is designed appropriately none of the above should apply. In fact from centralization under a best practice model, leaders should accrue the following benefits:
o Strategic advice provided by business partners
o Increased flexibility
o Improved management information
o Faster transactions
o Reduced number of unresolved queries
o Greater clarity on service and cost of provision
o Forum for finance to be strategically aligned to the needs of the Force
A Force that moves from a de-centralized to a centralized system should try and ensure that the finance function does not lose touch with the Chief Constable and Divisional Commanders. Forces need to have a robust business case for finance transformation combined with a governance structure that spans operational, tactical and strategic requirements. There is a risk that potential benefits of implementing such a change may not be realized if the program is not carefully managed. Investment is needed to create a successful centralized finance function. Typically the future potential benefits of greater visibility and control, consistent processes, standardized management information, economies of scale, long-term cost savings and an empowered group of proud finance professionals, should outweigh those initial costs.
To reduce the commercial, operational and capability risks, the finance functions can be completely outsourced or partially outsourced to third parties. This will provide guaranteed cost benefits and may provide the opportunity to leverage relationships with vendors that provide best practice processes.
Process Efficiencies
Typically for Police Forces the focus on development has developed a silo based culture with disparate processes. As a result significant opportunities exist for standardization and simplification of processes which provide scalability, reduce manual effort and deliver business benefit. From simply rationalizing processes, a force can typically accrue a 40% reduction in the number of processes. An example of this is the use of electronic bank statements instead of using the manual bank statement for bank reconciliation and accounts receivable processes. This would save considerable effort that is involved in analyzing the data, moving the data onto different spreadsheet and inputting the data into the financial systems.
Organizations that possess a silo operating model tend to have significant inefficiencies and duplication in their processes, for example in HR and Payroll. This is largely due to the teams involved meeting their own goals but not aligning to the corporate objectives of an organization. Police Forces have a number of independent teams that are reliant on one another for data with finance in departments, divisions and headquarters sending and receiving information from each other as well as from the rest of the Force. The silo model leads to ineffective data being received by the teams that then have to carry out additional work to obtain the information required.
Whilst the argument for development has been well made in the context of moving decision making closer to operational service delivery, the added cost in terms of resources, duplication and misaligned processes has rarely featured in the debate. In the current financial climate these costs need to be recognized.
Culture
Within transactional processes, a leading finance function will set up targets for staff members on a daily basis. This target setting is an element of the metric based culture that leading finance functions develop. If the appropriate metrics of productivity and quality are applied and when these targets are challenging but not impossible, this is proven to result in improvements to productivity and quality.
A ‘Best in Class’ finance function in Police Forces will have a service focused culture, with the primary objectives of providing a high level of satisfaction for its customers (departments, divisions, employees & suppliers). A ‘Best in Class’ finance function will measure customer satisfaction on a timely basis through a metric based approach. This will be combined with a team wide focus on process improvement, with process owners, that will not necessarily be the team leads, owning force-wide improvement to each of the finance processes.
Organizational Improvements
Organizational structures within Police Forces are typically made up of supervisors leading teams of one to four team members. Through centralizing and consolidating the finance function, an opportunity exists to increase the span of control to best practice levels of 6 to 8 team members to one team lead / supervisor. By adjusting the organizational structure and increasing the span of control, Police Forces can accrue significant cashable benefit from a reduction in the number of team leads and team leads can accrue better management experience from managing larger teams.
Technology Enabled Improvements
There are a significant number of technology improvements that a Police Force could implement to help develop a ‘Best in Class’ finance function.
These include:
A) Scanning and workflow
Through adopting a scanning and workflow solution to replace manual processes, improved visibility, transparency and efficiencies can be reaped.
B) Call logging, tracking and workflow tool
Police Forces generally have a number of individuals responding to internal and supplier queries. These queries are neither logged nor tracked. The consequence of this is dual:
o Queries consume considerable effort within a particular finance team. There is a high risk of duplicated effort from the lack of logging of queries. For example, a query could be responded to for 30 minutes by person A in the finance team. Due to this query not being logged, if the individual that raised the query called up again and spoke to a different person then just for one additional question, this could take up to 20 minutes to ensure that the background was appropriately explained.
o Queries can have numerous interfaces with the business. An unresolved query can be responded against by up to four separate teams with considerable delay in providing a clear answer for the supplier.
The implementation of a call logging, tracking and workflow tool to document, measure and close internal and supplier queries combined with the set up of a central queries team, would significantly reduce the effort involved in responding to queries within the finance departments and divisions, as well as within the actual divisions and departments, and procurement.
C) Database solution
Throughout finance departments there are a significant number of spreadsheets utilized prior to input into the financial system. There is a tendency to transfer information manually from one spreadsheet to another to meet the needs of different teams.
Replacing the spreadsheets with a database solution would rationalize the number of inputs and lead to effort savings for the front line Police Officers as well as Police Staff.
D) Customize reports
In obtaining management information from the financial systems, police staff run a series of reports, import these into excel, use lookups to match the data and implement pivots to illustrate the data as required. There is significant manual effort that is involved in carrying out this work. Through customizing reports the outputs from the financial system can be set up to provide the data in the formats required through the click of a button. This would have the benefit of reduced effort and improved motivation for team members that previously carried out these mundane tasks.
In designing, procuring and implementing new technology enabling tools, a Police Force will face a number of challenges including investment approval; IT capacity; capability; and procurement.
These challenges can be mitigated through partnering with a third party service company with whom the investment can be shared, the skills can be provided and the procurement cycle can be minimized.
Conclusion
It is clear that cultural, process and technology change is required if police forces are to deliver both sustainable efficiencies and high quality services. In an environment where for the first time forces face real cash deficits and face having to reduce police officer and support staff numbers whilst maintaining current performance levels the current finance delivery models requires new thinking.
While there a number of barriers to be overcome in achieving a best in class finance function, it won’t be long before such a decision becomes mandatory. Those who are ahead of the curve will inevitably find themselves in a stronger position.
Women’s Corporate Apparel
When it comes to apparel, women can be very choosy and this is especially true when they buy their office-wear. Today there is a wide array of apparels to choose from and they come in various sizes and types.The latest buzzword of today’s corporate world is “power dressing.” Power dressing not only makes the employees of corporate companies look young, but it also gives them a sophisticated look. It leaves gender and cultural differences way behind. Today’s corporate world demands this kind of formal dressing.When women dress sharply, their confidence increases and it gives them a sense of authority and empowerment. It lifts up their image at the workplace and helps maintain high professional standards. The inner radiance of women also matters and these women’s corporate apparels can help women achieve that.Women still prefer a softer style in the way they dress. For instance, they prefer to add their own accessories to the power dressing. Women choose apparels that are comfortable and give a feminine look to them. Women should be careful however to see to it that they avoid the casual style as far as possible and embrace a more conservative style.Being conservative in dressing style only enhance the image of women in society. It still retains the essence of being elegant and the air of panache.The colors women choose for their apparel is also very important, as this reflects back on their personality. The most preferred colors for the dress as well as for the shoes are usually pastel colors, dark brown and stylish black. These colors compliment your eyes and skin.The way women do their coiffure also goes a long way in enhancing the confidence of women. And last but not the least; women need to dress for success.