Are you interested in the best skin care available? If so you need to know about collagen skin care treatments. Collagen is one of the most important proteins in our bodies, and in particular in our skin, and collagen replacement as we age is essential. But most collagen treatments don’t actually resupply our skin’s store of collagen.Collagen is an extremely important protein for our bodies, and our skin, because it is extremely strong and forms fibers, or strands, that help hold us all together. And collagen in our skin helps keep our skin firmer and more elastic, and more supple.Pinch a piece of your skin and pull and let go and it snaps back into place. It’s collagen that supplies that “snap”. Well at least our skin snaps back into place if we’re young, but as we age that “snap” back reduces.Why? Because as we age our skin starts to lose it’s essential supply of collagen, and doesn’t produce as much as it did. Gradually our levels of skin collagen reduce, and that is one of the major causes of our wrinkles, lines, crows feet and sagging skin that we seem to be stricken with as we age.Basically our skin is losing it’s “snap”. It’s losing it’s skin elasticity, and is suffering more and more from the forces of gravity.So the question is, how do we restore our skin’s supply of collagen as we age? Are there collagen skin care treatments that successfully restore our skin’s collagen supplies? Do collagen treatments work?The basic answer is that most collagen skin care products don’t restore our skin supply at all. Traditional collagen skin care treatments found in most anti aging and skin care products revolve around adding it to that bottle of moisturizer or night cream or day cream or whatever cream it is that is promoted as an anti aging cream. Sadly though, there is no evidence that supplying collagen to the skin can result in the skin increasing it’s supply of collagen, because it is not known if skin collagen can even absorb any more.And it is known that collagen molecules are too big to penetrate the skin anyway, so any applied topically to the skin remains on the surface of the skin, unable to penetrate.So why would these skin care and anti aging companies put it in those bottles of skin care products if it really doesn’t actually do anything? Because when people see collagen listed on the label they buy the products, and those collagen skin care products you see on the shelves sell like crazy. So it’s in the bottle.But there is a product that is known to restore skin collagen. It doesn’t do it by adding it to the skin, because that isn’t shown to work. It does it by stimulating the skin to make more of it’s own. If the skin produces it’s own supplies that has to work, because the skin is restoring it’s own stock of collagen itself.It’s a product called Cynergy TK, and it’s found in the best natural skin care products. It’s very effective, studies have shown visible results within a month. But it’s expensive, so the big brands don’t use it. Why would they when their anti aging products sell like crazy with cheaper ingredients.But there are small niche skin care companies that make excellent collagen skin care products using Cynergy TK. They can’t possibley compete with the big brands on marketing, because they can’t afford the TV advertising, so they compete on product quality instead. So when they get a new customer they usually get a customer for life.And their products are cost competitive because they don’t need to factor in the cost of TV advertising. But because they don’t advertise you are unlikely to know their name.So if you’re looking for effective collagen skin care treatments they do exist, but you need to work a little harder to find them.
Online E-Commerce Websites – A Great Way to Make Money and Pad Your Resume With Work Experience
The worst thing about either being unemployed or without work experience, is trying to explain things to a prospective employer.Well I found the answer and its something that will cost you little to invest and will probably make you some money in the meantime. What I’m talking about is starting e-commerce websites which you can do without really any technical experience and relatively little money spent. I wish the Internet was around when I got out of school!Once you have any kind of presentable e-commerce website running, you can cover your butt and make yourself look good when accounting for time when you were unemployed or even never had a job in the first place by stating to your prospective employer that you owned and operated your own e-commerce business and show him the actual site(s). There is no way your prospective employer will be able to know how much you made with your e-commerce business and the chances are he will overestimate your revenue ten fold. It’s actually fun owning an E-Commerce website and you’ll learn things later later on through trial and error that you can apply to future jobs. You can actually develop good writing and business skills as its like operating your own business with hardly any investment!Here’s the easiest step by step method of owning an E-Commerce Store that I know of that I do myself:1. Decide on a specific product you want to sell.2. Come up with several Domain Names, as close as you can to the products name.3. Go to a Domain registration site and see if the domain name is available. I would recommend using a .COM domain and failing that a .Net or .Org. Almost all one word domain names are going to be taken so I would try to use the shortest three word domain name or possibly two if it was available. You may need to put a “Store” or My” with a 2 word combination to get an available domain name. Once you settle on a Domain name you need to register it, which will cost you roughly $8-$12 a year. Again try to get the shortest possible name that emphasizes the product you are selling.4. The easiest way I know to launch an E-Commerce site is through a program called “The Easy Store” of which I am a customer. This program is put out and installed by Zeus software and you basically don’t have to do much at all as they do almost everything. What Zeus does is put out an E-Commerce Website that sells all Amazon products and which Amazon is responsible for everything and you make a 4-6% commission for each sale from Amazon. Thus you are investing nothing on inventory, don’t process the order and aren’t collecting the money. Amazon does all that. Amazon then pays you for each item sold through your site. The Easy Store provides you with free web hosting for a year under one of their plans. Basically, if you sign up with the Easy Store, they will do all the entry work for you and walk you through things and give technical advice. You can contact them by phone if you have any technical matters. The Easy Store is not very expensive- note I do not have any financial interest in the company and I’m recommending it strictly as a customer who receives no benefit for recommending it. You do have to become an Amazon Associate which is free and takes less then a day to register. Listed below are two of my Easy Stores for example.5. Essentially the only thing you need to do is to come up with good Keyword descriptions that will come up high in search engines like Google which will draw a lot of your traffic for potential customers. You will also need to submit your domains to search Engines.6. The most important thing in an E-Commerce Store is that it looks professional. For another $80 or so, The Easy Store will custom design a logo for you. My Easy Stores which you can find below feature their custom logos.7. I would also join Google’s AdSense program which The Easy Store will put on your site for free once you register for AdSense. AdSense pays you a variable amount of money for each Google Ad on your site that gets clicked. Registration for AdSense is free. Do not click any ads yourself and do not have friends and family click, because if Google finds out, you will be banned from AdSense.8. Another way to get traffic to your website, is to write blogs and have them published online by different sites as well as your own.Keep in mind you won’t get rich quick and the rarer a product is, in all likely hood you’ll get more customers because there are many E-Commerce sites selling the same niche product. I can’t think of a better and cheaper method for gaining work experience for a future employer and making money at the same time.
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.