Tahir Hassan Munawar Technical Services LLC — SME Case Study (UAE)

Tahir Hassan Munawar Technical Services LLC Chris Jones

Technology has penetrated in our lives, improving our style of living as well as the way we do business. In today’s world where everyone seeks ease in technology, automation becomes part of each business. Automation means to instill certain techniques in some products so they start performing particular actions on their own.

Automation is aimed at improving efficiency, lowering errors, maximizing reliability, and speeding of up tasks.

One reason for the popularity of automation is that it also lowers the expenses of doing jobs that once were done by humans, but most importantly is the security and safety (Pham et al., 2018).

Tahir Hassan Munawar Technical Services LLC is such a company which thought to add automation to its businesses and started doing jobs like installing automatic parking barriers, automatic doors, sensors, Chris Jones Tahir Hassan Munawar Technical Services LLC cameras, locks, and other such kinds of techniques, which can add automation to business, building, or areas and can improve their security and safety. The company faced several ups and downs and many challenges, mainly because in the beginning, the concept was very new and there were very limited orders within the UAE.

But after years of the same business and facing several resistances, the company has reached a point where it is not only called stable, but a successful organization.

Tahir Hassan Munawar Services LLC was established in 2011, but its operations were stopped in 2014 because of losses. The operations were again started in 2016 and now the company is on the path of success.

Knowing that automation is the future, the current owner of the company wants to contribute to the success of others as well as to be part of a beautiful tomorrow, not just for the organization, but for the whole country. This is the reason that he has a mission to “to add automation in every aspect of the business and help it to grow.” Vision Statement The owner of the organization was born and raised in the UAE and had special aspirations for the future of himself as well as for his beloved country. He always wanted to serve the country through his business and hence, chose “to become the number one company in the Middle East offering automation services for businesses and organizations.”

Organizational Structure

As of 2021, the company has 11 employees including the owner of the business. Its organizational structure is

mentioned below

¡ Owner of the company/managing director - 1 ¡ Sales manager - 1 ¡ Technicians - 4 ¡ Administration sales officer - 1 ¡ Accountant - 1 ¡ Drivers - 2 The company has a hierarchical organizational structure and it is because the organization is small and this structure best suites them, where main decisions are taken by one person, which is usually the highest authority within the organization.

Owner Manager Technicians Administrator Driver

Figures 11: Types of Organizational Structures of Tahir Hussan Leadership Authoritative Affiliative Democratic Coercive Coaching Pacesetting Figures 12: Types of Leadership Style of Tahir Hussan Leadership The company was first established by Tahir Hassan, but due to lack of orders and poor management, the company closed down in 2014. Later, it was bought by two brothers named Mohammed Ali and Mohammed Mohsen. Their hard work led the company toward new highs. Currently, Ali is the owner of the company and looks over all operations. Hence, it could be said the leadership is quite educated and experienced. This could be one reason of its success. There are six successful leadership

styles

autocratic, visionary, affiliate, democratic, pacesetter, and coach (Yasir et al., 2016).

Autocratic: One advantage of autocratic leadership is that decisions are made quickly because an authoritative person is only one or few, such as in the case of Tahir Hassan Munawar LLC. Another benefit is that the work is streamlined, the owner or higher authorities have good control not only on human resources, but also on asset utilization and targets are best focused on to reach the ultimate goal. Since supervision is close, productivity is usually high. However, it is also true that this leadership style is not considered suitable for large organizations, as they are multilayered and complex. Yet Amazon, one of the biggest e-commerce giant of this century, uses this leadership style and is still successful. The management of the Tahir Hassan Munawar organization is far-sighted and its style of management is also autocratic because it is a small organization and it best suites them.

Visionary: In this style of leadership, usually the employees within the organization follow the leader and respect his wants. It works best in the situation when some deep changes are required within the business.

Affiliate: This leadership style is ideal to develop the workplace into a positive place to work and it believes in motivating people through positive feedback.

Democratic: In this style of leadership, the followers or employees are provided with opportunities to speak about their thinking and if considered, their choices are implemented.

Pace Setting: It is considered that the business is achieving quick results in this style and it is also a highly enthusiastic style of leadership.

Coach: This leadership style aims to improve the performance of the employees and turn a workplace into a positive one.

At the time of establishment of the company, there were more than 15 employees including technicians, drivers, administrators, accountants, and others. But the company couldn’t bring balance in its earnings and thus closed down. The new owner worked in a calculative way as in the beginning, with himself doing the technician job and increased the labor when he saw the company was growing.

Product Design Automatic parking barriers and automatic doors are best for small to medium sized businesses. The company’s services include parking barrier, gate barrier, automatic glass doors, manual arm barriers, automatic height restrictors, sensors, cameras, and etc. These services are offered to businesses, hospitals, schools, restaurants, hotels, and even if needed, for domestic use.

Figure 13: Product Description of the Tahir Hussan Munawar Organization

There are four basic business strategies: position, innovation, disruption, and execution.

¡ Position Strategy: In this business strategy, businesses pay attention to location and try to be easily accessible to a large number of audiences that target different societies. One example is McDonald’s, as it penetrated deep within almost every society and further wanted to provide ease of access and associated services.

¡ Innovation Strategy: In this business strategy, the organization pays attention to innovation. Examples are Apple, DuPont, and Google, because these companies focus on bringing innovation in their products and services so that people get attached to them.

¡ Disruption Strategy: In this strategy, the businesses disrupt the industry through different techniques such as Amazon. This is the organization which targeted first the book readers through disrupting the publishing industry, then it targeted the general public by disrupting the retail services.

¡ Execution Strategy: The Ritz Carlton is a famous example for this strategy because it executes its services in a perfect way that customers are not going anywhere else despite having some high prices.

(Akhmedova et al., 2019) The Tahir Hassan Munawar Organization deploys the disruption strategy as it brings changes in the security industry.

Out of these basic business strategies, there are derived

strategies such as the ones mentioned below

¡ Differentiation: In a differentiation strategy, attention is paid on being different and attracting customers such as Apple.

¡ Focused Differentiation: This strategy is not much different than differentiation except that it is for narrow markets such as Lexus.

¡ Integrated Cost Leadership: This strategy is an agglomeration of both low cost and being a different strategy.

The following two strategies are implemented by the Tahir Hassan Munawar organization.

¡ Focused Cost Leadership: This strategy helps the organization to offer its services comparatively cheap but with good services and good quality to beat the competition.

¡ Cost Leadership: In this strategy, the company sometimes also accepts orders which may be less than the normal price in the market and can give a good advantage in the future. (Kumar & Rahman, 2015)

Operational strategies include high quality services with reliability and full customer satisfaction because the owner knows what happens when customers are not satisfied.

The following marketing strategies are employed by the

company

¡ Word-of-Mouth: This strategy was within the organization from its beginning because at that time, the company did not have many resources to spend on marketing, thus it relied on word-of-mouth.

¡ Social Media marketing: Currently the company is taking help from social media marketing through email and social media platforms like Facebook.

¡ Referral

Marketing

The company pushes its customers by offering good services to refer them.

(Varadarajan, 2009).

The business has undergone several challenges since it was first launched in 2011, including closing down in

• In 2016, the business was started again under new

owners and accelerated toward success. Even when the unforeseen problem of COVID-19 hit, the business grew as demand for automation increased due to security reasons. The year of 2020 proved to be the worst since

• However, 2021 is expected to be the best.

Overcoming Challenges The first challenge it faced was the imbalance between expenses and profits due to the business having been closed. The owner and the business struggled to get through COVID-19.

The new management of the company has learned several things from the mistakes of the past and tried to be careful by following the rules of business sustainability to survive in the long run. The following are some of the best practices the management

accounts for its success

¡ Engage Workers: The owners tried to engage workers in the business to enhance their productivity and interest (Yasir et al., 2016). For this, the employees are being awarded for some incentives on completion of each task, as well as when the company touches new records.

¡ Vulnerability: Leaders within the organization empower workers, talk to them openly and accept their ideas or suggestions.

¡ Stay Committed: The employees are trained in a way that they show their commitment toward work as well as for the company.

¡ Clarity: Every employee within the organization has clear purposes and they know why they are in the company and what they can do in future.

¡ Transparency

The management focuses on transparency as it believes transparency becomes the reason for an employee’s motivation.

The first failed practice was to keep balance in income and expenses and also to encourage employees to enhance their productivity by offering incentives.

Tahir Hassan Munawar Technical Services LLC is a company which grew from a small to medium sized organization. It also suffered from various ups and downs. Currently, it employs around 10 employees and is hopeful for success in the future. Since re-launching, the graph of success of the company is trending upward.

It was expected that 2020 will be the worst for the organization, but that didn’t happen because more and more businesses asked for services of automatic parking barriers, doors, surveillance cameras.

It is recommend to keep up the successful business practices and pay special attention toward the growth and development of employees because in small to medium organizations, employees become more important assets than capital.

The management has learned from past mistakes as to creating an imbalance between income and expenses. It also learned from the mistakes of employees, including management, that if employees are not treated well, they can damage the organization.

The company offers automation services which are high in demand and future growth is expected to further flourish. The company suffered through difficult times but is currently stable and hoping for success and expansion in coming years. Here, it is concluded that determination, hard work, dedication, good leadership, and appropriate business strategies can turn impossible into possible and Tahir Hassan Munawar Technical Services is an example of it.