Lean management methods: Evidence from the manufacturing industry in the Czech Republic

In the current conditions of the Ukrainian economy, which is characterized by crisis phenomena and frequent changes in legislation, the insurance organizations are facing a number of difficulties in maintaining their financial sustainability. Moreover, these processes take place under the increased requirements for solvency of insurers. However, a significant part of domestic insurance companies is financially unstable, which is conditioned not only by the lack of funds, but also by the low level of management. This situation hinders the further development of the insurance market in Ukraine and has a negative impact on all areas of the domestic financial system and prevents it from successful integration into the European financial field. In order to address this problem, it is necessary to distinguish the key groups of risks that affect the financial sustainability of insurance organizations, among which there are the following: insurance, strategic, market risk, risk of inefficient capital structure, risk of limiting the insurance company’s liquidity, tax risk, investment risk, operational risk, the risk of ineffective organizational structure of the enterprise, and information risk. It should be noted that under conditions of changing environment, the impact of these risks only increases, and therefore the task of minimizing the impact of these risks on the activities of insurance companies is highly important. Accordingly, the authors of the article proposed a four-stage strategy to manage the financial sustainability of the insurance company, the purpose of which is to identify the risks of limiting the insurer’s financial sustainability, their qualitative and quantitative assessment, as well as the development and implementation of appropriate measures to minimize and eliminate unacceptable consequences.

This paper is devoted to the investigation of environmental, social and governance investment (investment with ESG criterion) normative base in the context of standardization process in sustainable economy financing. Complexity of such standardization and the lack of commonly accepted regulations, indexes metrics are under discussions of scholars, which encourage the need for clear guidance in ESG investment. 651 sustainability rating products and more than 300 investment policy instruments in different countries show the need for classifying the ESG standards. The solution of this scientific and practical task is based on the developed ESG investment standards system classifications. Proposed classification incorporates such criteria as level of standards adoption, mandatory degree, sectorial specificity, degree of companies’ awareness of responsible activity, ensuring transparency and the benchmarks formation, creating the institutional support of the ESG investment standardization process in sustainable economy and making more grounded investment and regulatory decisions.

Risk management is one of the prominent issues which are pivotal to the success of a business and may adversely affect profitability if not properly practised. Therefore, the main objective of this paper was to determine risk management practices in manufacturing SMEs in Cape Town. The research conducted was quantitative in nature and constituted the collection of data from 74 SME leaders, all of whom had to adhere to a list of strict delineation criteria. All data collected were thoroughly analyzed through means of descriptive statistics. From the findings made, it is clear that SMEs in the manufacturing sector do in fact understand risk management initiatives applicable to ‘manage’ their respective businesses towards sustainability, but not to a large extent. It was found that respondents are unaware of the elements which make risk management effective, which ultimately aids to the development of problems for SMEs. All employees, managers and owners must coordinate their efforts together to identify and manage organizational risks within their ambit to obtain total risk coverage, as well as provide assurance that these risks are effectively managed from a coordinated approach. Further studies may be carried out to identify measures that can be taken to improve the effectiveness of risk management practices in SMEs.