Help!!
Assignment1
Instructions: Please answer the question in
Part I
and then complete Part II.
Your initial discussion post must be a minimum of 250 words.
When incorporating outside information/facts, please provide the reference citation for your sources.
Part I
· Instructions: Research a job position specific to the SCM function and describe why the position is important to the organization? Please state the job tile, position description and organization. You may use a job/career search site such as indeed.com for your research.
Assignment 2
Instructions: Please answer the question in Part I and then complete Part II.
Your initial discussion post must be a minimum of 250 words.
When incorporating outside information/facts, please provide the reference citation for your sources.
Part I
Please review the information below and then answer the corresponding question(s).
· Supply Chain: All organizations, processes, and activities involved in the flow of goods from the raw materials to the final consumer.
· Supply Chain Management (SCM): Planning and coordinating the movement of products along the supply chain.
· Logistics: Subset of SCM that focuses on the tactics involved in moving products along the supply chain.
· Instructions: Briefly describe why supply chain management is vital to the wholesale and retail industry. What changes are occurring in the industry that may impact how products are developed and delivered to the end consumer? Please include specific examples.
Assignment 3
Instructions: Please answer the question in Part I and then complete Part II.
Your initial discussion post must be a minimum of 250 words.
When incorporating outside information/facts, please provide the reference citation for your sources.
Part I
Sustainable management plays a vital role in maintaining the quality of life on our planet. Sustainable management can be applied to all aspects of our lives.For example, the practices of a business should be sustainable if they wish to stay in businesses, because if the business is unsustainable, then by the definition of sustainability they will cease to be able to be in competition.
· Instructions: Select a company of your choice and describe the company’s “Sustainable management” operational practices. As an example, visit
Nike’s Sustainable Innovation
site. You may not use Nike as your company choice.
Assignment 4
Instructions: Please answer the question in Part I and then complete Part II.
Your initial discussion post must be a minimum of 250 words.
When incorporating outside information/facts, please provide the reference citation for your sources.
Part I
A project manager is a person who has the overall responsibility for the successful initiation, planning, design, execution, monitoring, controlling and closure of a project.
· Describe the characteristics of a successful project manager. What type of project manager would you be? Why? Please explain.
Assignment 5
Instructions
Look through the POWER POINT file provided that features company ideas that succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. You can find the slide show in the Assignments Folder for this Module (i.e.- Power Point: Bad Idea? Good Idea?)
When you view the slide show you should also read the notes pages that give basic information on each company. IT MAY BE NECESSARY to DOWNLOAD the PPT file to access the notes page for each slide.
Select your favorite idea/company from the ones included in the Power Point presentation, research the company and explain (using concepts from the textbook and course) what went into generating success for this idea. Your submission should be approximately 250 words AND your REFERENCES MUST be listed for any credit to be received for your submission.
Please submit your work using the drop box.
ONLY ONE
FILE ATTACHMENT ALLOWED FOR THIS DROP BOX.
ALWAYS
proof-read your submissions and check for proper spelling and grammar.
USE ONLY
APPROVED FILE TYPES(i.e.- MS Word or PDF files)
DO NOT
USE THE E-PORTFOLIO for SUBMISSIONS
STRANGER THINGS HAVE HAPPENED:
What can become of a “Crazy” idea?
BRILLIANT or BAD IDEA?
How do we determine if an idea is great, okay or horrible?
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Dot-com star Tony Hsieh initially was skeptical that Zappos could succeed. The concept, he thought, was “the poster child of bad Internet ideas,” because he doubted shoppers would buy shoes they couldn’t try on. But Hsieh became the company’s chief executive and helped sell the company to Amazon.com (AMZN) in 2009 for $888 million.
In 1975, Gary Dahl was a 38-year-old advertising executive joking around with pals when he hit upon the idea of selling rocks in paper crates and calling them pets. The gag would earn him a lot of money.
Companies such as FedEx (FDX) and Amazon weren’t instant hits with a skeptical — or downright dismissive — investment community. And remember when Twitter seemed like a joke? The company was recently valued at $1 billion. What a riot!
Here’s a closer look at these ideas and a few others that defied conventional wisdom and found commercial success.
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PET ROCKS
When it comes to frivolous fads, the Pet Rock is king. It was the brainchild of Gary Dahl, a 38-year-old advertising executive from Los Gatos, Calif., who, upon hearing friends complain about their pets, opined that a rock was the ideal low-maintenance companion.
Dahl began to take his joke seriously. He wrote a manual on the proper care and handling of rocks. He packaged his pets in little cardboard kennels, complete with air holes and straw bedding to keep the little fellas comfy.
Dahl took his creation to a San Francisco gift show in August 1975, and the novelty item was picked up by upscale retailer Neiman Marcus. A Newsweek story followed. Pet Rocks became a joke worth $3.95 each, and 1.5 million people paid to be in on it.
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If ever a communication medium proved that less is more, it’s Twitter, the social-networking service that lets its 100 million registered users send “tweets,” messages of no more than 140 characters, and read those of other users.
Four years after the service’s debut, tweets are flying around the globe at a rate of about 750 per second. Twitter has morphed into something its inventors didn’t intend: a broadcast news service. A Harvard Business School study revealed that the median lifetime number of tweets per subscriber is one. Most Twitter users aren’t using the service to keep in touch with friends; they’re awaiting the next tweet from Ashton
Kutcher.
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FARMVILLE
Farming is hard. The hours are long, crop prices fluctuate wildly, and a couple of storms can ruin your season. So why would anyone accept the headaches and hassles of farming without the payoff of cultivating something tangible?
FarmVille is a real-time farm-simulation game developed by Zynga
Game Network. The game allows Facebook members to manage a virtual farm by planting, growing and harvesting virtual crops and raising virtual livestock.
For some of the game’s 80 million registered users, virtual farming appears to be surprisingly addictive, according to an article in The New York Times that quoted a woman who felt her husband was too absorbed in his FarmVille hobby. The anonymous woman blogged that she was pregnant and wrote: “I was starving . . . and he told me I’d have to wait a few more minutes so he could HARVEST HIS RASPBERRIES!”
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ROOMBA
Robots are the stuff of science fiction. Vacuums are sold mainly to people who probably haven’t seen a movie since before the kids were born. The Roomba is a robotic vacuum cleaner sold by its creator, iRobot
(IRBT), that automatically navigates a living space and its obstacles while sucking up dirt and debris from the floor.
The company, established in 1990 by engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, makes robots for government, military and home applications. In addition to Roomba, it has the Looj gutter-cleaning robot, the Seaglider unmanned underwater vehicle for oceanographic research and the PackBot, which performs battlefield reconnaissance and bomb disposal.
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VIRTUAL GOODS & SERVICES
In these times of economic trouble, who’d spend real money on nonexistent goods? You might be surprised to know that one in eight Internet users bought virtual goods in 2009, according to Magid and Associates and PlaySpan, spending $90 on average. Global revenue from all virtual-goods transactions last year was estimated at $10 billion.
A virtual economy took root when the virtual world Second Life was created in 2003 by Linden Lab. The site has grown into a meta-universe where users interact through avatars, creating and trading virtual property and services with each other. Fashion, specifically shoes, is among the biggest sellers on Second Life. An avatar’s got to look good.
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ZAPPOS
Zappos is a billion-dollar company with customer service characteristic of a mom-and-pop shop. Shoe buyers respond favorably to the company’s no-hassle return policy and its offering of hard-to-find styles and sizes. But what really sets Zappos apart is that it has figured out how to insert human contact into the normally chilly void of Internet shopping.
Chief Executive Tony Hsieh credits much of the company’s success to its employees. He writes in a book, “Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose,” that the company reached a turning point when he shifted his focus away from chasing profits and toward the satisfaction and mentoring of his staff.
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CROCS
The plan to populate the world with Crocs (CROX) was hatched in the late 1990s by three pals from Boulder, Colo. On a sailing trip in Florida, the trio became intrigued by the commercial possibilities of a comfortable spa shoe. They eventually acquired the shoe’s maker, a Quebec company called Foam Creations, to secure the rights to the foam resin called Croslite, responsible for shoe’s squishy, form-fitting sole.
Kids, gardeners, boaters and college students have adored the brightly colored footwear. Nurses and other workers who have to spend long hours standing have found the affordable, easy-to-clean shoes a godsend. Crocs executives wisely played up the shoe’s ugly factor in ad campaigns. Annual sales reached $350 million by 2006, the year the company went public.
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AMAZON
In 1994, when a financial analyst named Jeff
Bezos hatched the idea of selling stuff over the Internet, the idea of building a store in cyberspace was fairly radical. According to a Fortune magazine profile, Bezos’ work with New York investment company D.E. Shaw led him to this statistic: Online sales were increasing at a rate of 2,300% per year. Books, being easy to ship and always in demand, seemed to Bezos like the logical place to start.
Time magazine named Bezos its Person of the Year in 1999, five years after he founded Amazon.com (AMZN), a website that consumers initially considered drab and hard to use. Today, the company attracts 65 million users to its U.S. pages each month.
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FEDEX
The seeds of FedEx (FDX) were sown in 1965 in a report written for an economics class by Yale University student Fred Smith. Smith outlined an overnight air-freight system for time-sensitive shipments such as medicines, computer parts and electronics. Smith later said he couldn’t recall the grade given to his paper, but he guessed it was his “usual gentlemanly C” ( file). Regardless of the impression it made on his professor, Smith said that he knew the idea was profound.
Smith launched his overnight delivery service in 1973 with just seven packages for the first night’s run. The young executive looked for cash anywhere he could find it, at one point high-tailing it to Las Vegas to play the blackjack tables and wiring his $27,000 in winnings to FedEx so it could meet a payroll.
Smith’s determination and persistence paid off. Merrill Lynch employees ultimately found FedEx so reliable and quick that they reportedly used it to deliver documents between floors at their Manhattan headquarters rather than rely on interoffice mail.
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FRESH DIRECT
The story of online grocer FreshDirect is something of a chicken-or-egg riddle. Did FreshDirect emerge because New Yorkers were too busy to shop for groceries, or did New Yorkers spurn trips to grocery stores once FreshDirect appeared? One thing is certain: People like the idea of ordering groceries on their computers and having them delivered to their front doors.
FreshDirect was founded in 1999. Three years and $75 million in marketing research later, the company’s refrigerated trucks hit the streets of Manhattan. Roughly one in six Manhattan residents has purchased groceries from FreshDirect. The company sees its future in the suburbs and has expanded to Long Island, New Jersey, Connecticut and other areas around New York.
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