Category: Business

The following is a highly educational interactive exercise, which visually demonstrates the impact of various strategic decisions that you can make, under different kinds of industry characteristics. You may play the simulation as many times as you like.

After playing the simulation game, write a 5-6 page paper covering the following questions.
1. Please define each type of market structure (monopoly, oligopoly, monopolistic competition, and perfect competition). Be sure to paraphrase information in your own words, and cite your sources.
2. Describe the competitive advantage/unique resources Computers possesses in the monopoly market scenario. To this end, describe why intellectual property rights are important in a capitalistic market system. How might a firm hedge against an expiring patent so they can maintain some sort of competitive advantage into the future?
3. In an oligopoly firms try to avoid competing on prices, and probably try to avoid competing in other aspects to the marketing mix (products, promotion, placing). Is this possible in this market?
4. In a monopoly scenario, the firm does not need to worry about generic strategies. However, as firms move through successively more competitive market structures, they need to consider which type of generic strategy to implement. After referring to Porter’s Generic Strategies in the MBA Reference Guide, comment on which strategy you recommend depending on the oligopoly, monopolistic competition, and perfect competition scenarios. Please make sure to justify your answers.
5. Consider the perfect competition scenario. After reading the Porter’s Five Forces that is included in the MBA Reference Guide, rate each of the forces as high-medium-low and justify your rankings. In a perfect competition scenario, is the computer industry attractive? Why, or why not?

Please note all the information and any related data presented in this project are NOT accurate, and are not supported by any reference either. They are only provided for you for this project. You should not assume that this is real data.
Background
In this project, we will be working on a supply network design problem for a company— let’s call the company ‘SND Australia Limited’ and use ‘SND’ for short. SND operates across Australia in the following major cities: Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney.
SND has an overseas supplier—let’s call it ‘OVS’—which has been steadily supplying SND’s demand over the years. OVS uses sea transport to supply SND and transports all the goods to the designated ports as specified by SND. As all the major cities have ports, we assume that once freight reaches a port, there will be no additional cost required to get into the corresponding city. There will be additional costs, however, if SND decides to re-direct freight from one city to another city within Australia. When such a decision is made, the re-direction of freight will be managed via road transport and the corresponding road freight charges apply.
Affected by recent uncertainty and volatility in business environment, the top management of SND has allocated a budget for setting up a subsidiary in Australia—let’s call it ‘DMS’— to complement any quick surge in demand. The subsidiary DMS, when requested, will be able to produce a maximum of 500 units per month for SND. At other times, DMS seeks opportunities from other business and therefore does not incur cost to SND. In this project, please assume that the set up cost of DMS will be the same for any city in Australia. In this sense, this set up (fixed) cost does not need to be considered.
SND adopts and operates on a monthly ordering cycle and therefore we will only focus on one month’s logistics activities to design the supply network. The objective is to design a supply network that minimises the total logistics cost. Table 1 lists the demand for each major city and the unit production cost if DMS chooses to operate at the particular city.

Demand at Units Produce at Unit cost
Adelaide 420 DMS Adelaide $450
Brisbane 870 DMS Brisbane $480
Melbourne 1,250 DMS Melbourne $505
Perth 930 DMS Perth $490
Sydney 1,310 DMS Sydney $515
DMS OVS $440
Table 1: Demand and unit production cost for SND.
Transport Cost and Lead Time
Sea transport will be used for the shipments from the overseas supplier OVS; while road transport will be used for transport within Australia. For sea transport, we will be able to use either 20’ or 40’ containers. In addition, less-than-container load (LCL) could also be used, i.e., sea transport on a unit basis and charged by the number of units shipped. Each 40’ container can hold 200 units; and each 20’ container can hold half of that amount, i.e., 100 units. Due to loading and safety constraints, containers must be fully loaded at all times. If the number of units is not enough to fill a full container, then the LCL option—where special safety measures are taken—must be used.
$/40’ container $/20’ container $/LCL unit Lead times (Days)
Adelaide 2,000 1,200 25 30
Brisbane 1,600 1,000 20 21
Melbourne 1,800 1,100 23 28
Perth 1,200 700 15 18
Sydney 1,650 1,050 22 25
Table 2: Sea transport cost and lead time from overseas supplier to cities
SND needs to pay its supplier upfront, which means that SND needs to bear the inventory holding cost when the freight is being transported from OVS. Table 2 presents the unit transport prices for a 40’ container, a 20’ container, and a unit transported via LCL. The lead time of sea transport between OVS and each major city is also listed in the table. The accounting department mentions that an annual interest rate of 15% would be reasonable to calculate the inventory holding cost.
Within Australia, road transport will be used. The unit transport cost between each pair of cities is shown in Table 3.Becauseefficientroadtransportonlytakes1–3daysbetween any pair of cities, the holding cost can be safely ignored
Adelaide Brisbane Melbourne Perth Sydney
Adelaide $0 $35 $10 $35 $25
Brisbane $35 $0 $25 $70 $15
Melbourne $10 $25 $0 $45 $15
Perth $35 $70 $45 $0 $55
Sydney $25 $15 $15 $55 $0
Table 3: Road transport cost per unit between cities
Project Tasks
The tasks for the project are straightforward, as a group, you need to determine:
1. What is the lowest cost for SND? (Remember to include all the related cost components in your model.) And where should SND set up its subsidiary DMS?
2. How is the international sea transport and the domestic road transport managed?
3. What can you conclude from you model
4. How sensitive is your solution to some of the parameters, such as unit cost at different places, transport cost, lead time?
5. How sensitive is your solution to the fluctuations of demand?
6. What will happen if SND does not set up the subsidiary DMS? More specifically, how would the transport operations change?

Assignment 2 consists of two components, assuming both would be provided to the CEO/Headof your chosen organisation:

1) Practical component: submission of a working dashboard. Build the dashboard you proposedin Assignment 1 using one of the BI tools you’ve been taught in the course

The dashboard must use at least one of the new types of visualisations (not just charts) and usedata from more than one source.

2) Written component:
– Explain the challenges in developing the dashboard
– Identify the type of BI users the intended audience of the dashboard are
– Describe the specific data used, and explain why that particular data
would be useful forthe intended audience of the dashboard
– Given the above, provide recommendations on
– Why the organisation would benefit investing further in BIA
– What the organisation could do to make BIA implementation easier,
including tomanage the challenges of BIA
– Which dashboard or report the organisation should develop next
– Include screenshot(s) of your working dashboard

Organisations for assignments: Samsung

Scope
You can choose to cover all areas of the organisation or focus on particular field of operation
(eg: marketing, HR, manufacturing, environment sustainability, public reputation). If you are doing a
degree in that area, you might find that useful.
For example
One of Apple’s strengths is being able to manufacturing and deliver to millions of customers
globally. A threat to that may be worker injury, equipment breaking down or unreliable
distribution. Which groups/users in Apple would want data to deal with those issues – what data
would they need ? In what form ?
A company that needs to do a better job of recruiting the right staff – the dashboard then would
be for HR managers.

Key Task #1: Chart out answers to each of these questions for your core product idea. Make a
table that summarizes each question and your answer to the question (a spreadsheet is fine).
Based your answers, please color-code your answers to identify the level of validation for your
answer to each question: GREEN – green means that you have compelling
quantitative/qualitative support for your answer from analyzing both the analogs and antilogs,
data from the early adopters and early majority, or industry experts, and you are willing to stake
your venture (i.e., your grade in this class) on the validity of this information. YELLOW – means
you have partial quantitative/qualitative support for your answer based on analogs, antilogs, from
early adopters/early majority, or from industry experts. RED — means that your answer is still a
SWAG. The Yellow and Red answers are going to be the basis of your hypotheses.
Problem:
• Who are your customer visionaries and where will you find them?
• What problems do these customers have?
• How aware are customers of the problem?
• What is the magnitude of this customer pain?
Solution:
• What are the key features/attributes of your product/service?
• What specific problems will these features/attributes solve?
• What is the minimum feature set (i.e., minimum viable product) that you can launch with
to reach the early adopters? Which features does the MVP leave out?
• What current solutions does the customer utilize now?
Customer Segments:
• Who are the different customer segments that will purchase/use your product/service?
• What market type are you entering into? New product in existing market? Re-defining/resegmenting
an existing market? Create a new market?
• What are the key attributes of the early adopters v. early majority in targeted customer
segments?
•
Unique Value Proposition:
• What is the economic “value” of the pain your target customer segments are currently
experiencing (i.e., “what are the measurable, specific proposed results?”
• What is the economic, social, psychological, etc. value of the solution (set) to your
targeted customer segments you are offering?
• How would your customers justify purchasing this product or service (i.e., what is their
ROI?)?
• How does your price compare with the social, psychological, economic, etc. “value” of
the pain they are currently experiencing?
Key Task #2: The objective of Key Task #2 in the CDP is to validate the key assumptions and
areas of uncertainty (i.e., the yellow and red answers from the table you created) by making
contact with key early-adopters/product evangelists (i.e., customers).
• Step #1: Make a list of 10 specific “friendly” early-adopters (customers), innovators,
competitors, and industry experts that you can contact to present your hypotheses.
o The goal here is to identify “friendly” contacts who will give you honest feedback
on your ideas. You are not trying to sell them anything, but rather just validate
your key hypotheses and your overall vision. Also, you don’t formally present
your hypotheses to these customers, but rather you summarize your assumptions
and ideas, and get their feedback. (Play the student card)
• Step #2: Develop a mode of contact and a semi-scripted interview script for contacting
for these friendly customers/places where you can effectively solicit feedback on your
hypotheses.
o In developing your script, please make special note of the information you are
looking for and how specific answers might inform your hypotheses allowing you
to move the hypotheses from yellow and red to green.
(STOP HERE FOR CDP #1)
• Step #3: Make contact with as many of these individuals as you need to conduct
interviews to gather at least two points of data which point to a validated answer to your
hypotheses.
o These interviews will bring up new insights and ideas. You need to be able to
figure out if these new data points require you to revise your hypotheses and pivot
or to seek out new earlyvangelists that can give you additional feedback about
your concept. At the end of this process, you don’t want any red hypotheses after
you finish this task. (Note: If you are meeting the customer in person, you need to
always travel with a partner from your team). Record their answers in either a
video or audio format. If you decide to take hand-written notes, your partner will
need to take the notes so you can focus on the Q & A. Please make sure none of
your interviews last longer than 45-minutes with a single respondent.
• Step #4: Analyze the responses of your customer and be prepared to pivot your concept
based on customer feedback.
o Be sure to consider the following questions when pivoting: What specific
information did you glean which validates/invalidates your current hypotheses?
What information did you learn that confirmed your current vision? What
information did you learn that was potentially contradictory to your current
vision? Based on these answers, please summarize your findings for the early
adopters and identify any pivots that you might need to take as you continue to
move your idea forward. When you make pivots, please update your table from
CDP1 with the new direction you are taking, and be sure to mark the revised
hypothesis as either yellow, red, or green.

 
This assignment is based on the Reed Supermarkets case. Your analysis should run no more than 8 pages in total, double spaced in Word excluding appendix exhibits.

Assume that your team has been hired by Meredith Collins, the Vice President of Marketing for Reed Supermarkets to help them find the most effective means of gaining a leadership position in the Columbus market. Your situation analysis will address the following key questions listed below.
.
1. Of the general segmentation approaches discussed in class, select two that your team feels to be most appropriate for the current state of the supermarket category in Columbus, and describe them.
a. Of the two approaches that you selected, which one do you believe has the most profit potential for Reed, and why?
2. What is Reed’s position in the Columbus market? Create a perceptual map of the market, selecting the factors that you believe to be most relevant as axes and plot the leading stores as appropriate.
a. Where is the area of greatest opportunity? Can Reed meet this opportunity? Why or why not?
b. Write a statement positioning Reed Supermarkets optimally for this opportunity.
3. The management team at Reed has been given a growth share goal of 16% (+2pp) by Reed CEO Jack Morrissey. Assuming that this is possible to do, from where will the share growth most likely be sourced? Will it come from dollar stores; Aldi; or other types of stores mentioned in the case? For whichever type of store you choose to be the most likely source of volume,
a. Discuss Reed’s competencies vs. this store type in terms of the factors affecting consumer channel choice.
b. How can Reed compete effectively vs. your selected store type across the elements of the marketing mix? Be sure to address all mix elements.
4. What type of store does your team view to be the biggest competitive threat to Reed Supermarkets? Is it dollar stores as was suggested in the case; or something else? Why do you say this?
a. Complete a brief SWOT analysis for Reed, including Strengths and Weaknesses (internal factors), and Opportunities and Threats (external factors). Provide your top 3 elements for each quadrant.
b. Versus the competitor that you’ve selected, what Strengths and Opportunities can Reed exploit? What Weaknesses and Threats will be most difficult for Reed to surmount?
5. What pricing strategy does your team recommend that Reed Supermarkets pursue moving forward?
a. Should they maintain their current position; retreat from further price competition and focus on branding and additional higher margin items; adopt a more price-oriented strategy (through increased dollar specials or EDLP); or some other strategy?.
b. What are the risks and rewards associated with Reed embarking on your recommended strategy?
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Additional Files

You are required to:
i) Describe the activities of 4 retail stores in UAE in terms of types of retail, location, relative store size, merchandise assortment, target audience, store design/layout (with photo), promotion activities and services offered (6%);
ii) Discuss how or why you like and dislike each of the store identified in i) above (6%)
iii) Identify future retailing practices you would want to experience (1%)
– Good essay structure, referencing and binding would earn 1 %.
– Application of any three human senses would earn 1 %.