Assignment Task 1: Strategic Supply Chain Management and Logistics
LO1. Understand the relationship between supply chain management (SCM) and organizational business objectives 1.1 What are the organizational objectives of Meditech Surgicals? Explain the importance of an effective supply chain management in achieving the organizational objectives at Meditech Surgicals. (Assessment Criteria 1.1: Explain the importance of effective supply chain management in achieving organizational objectives) The organizational objectives of Meditech Surgicals are:
To be a leader in the endoscopic surgical instrument market.
To deliver cost effective and innovative endoscopy surgical instruments to hospitals on time
To provide the best customer service to domestic and international customers Supply chain management plays an important role in achieving the organizational objectives. It aims to link all the supply chain agents to jointly cooperate within the firm as a way to maximize productivity in the supply chain and deliver the most benefits to all related parties (Finch 2006). It helps organization to stay competitive in the market by outsourcing its non core functions and focusing on the core competencies. It allows organizations to rejig their entire operations and reframe it so that they operate at lower costs and maximize profit margins. For being a market leader, an organization must re- look the whole process and determine which processes can be downsized or upscaled for maximum competitive advantage. The main reason and objective of SCM is to provide a strategic weapon to build up and enhance sustainable competitive advantage by cost reduction without compromising customer satisfaction (Mentzer et al. 2001). When the organization reduces cost and maximizes value, products and processes become more innovative. This results in effective mass customization and improves product life cycles. Thus, the organization is powered well to cater to varied market segments and customer choices.
1.2 What are the prime business functions of Meditech Surgicals? Explain the link between supply chain management and business functions in Meditech Surgicals. (Assessment Criteria 1.2: Explain the link between supply chain management and business functions in an organization) The prime business functions of Meditech Surgicals are:
Forecast demands and procure raw materials accordingly
Produce high end and innovative endoscopical surgical equiments
Deliver and distribute the equipments in a timely fashion and maintain sufficient inventory
Enhance profitability by catering to varied demands The supply chain constitutes of the total process ranging from obtaining raw materials through all suppliers to delivering the end product to the consumer. Supply Chain is the total chain of exchange from original source of raw material, through various firms involved in extracting and processing raw materials, manufacturing, assembling, distributing, and retailing to end customers (Saunders, 1997). Each step of the process adds value to the end product thereby making it a value chain. Thus it touches upon each of the business function by exchanging value addition. Business functions which are closely linked to supply chain management are: demand forecasting, production planning, raw material procurement, production of finished goods, storage and distribution, transportation, and order management. With an effective SCM, the organization will always have the right inventory holding and this eliminates the need for safety stock. Right from procurement of raw materials from suppliers to delivering finished goods to end consumer, an effective Supply chain management makes all the business functions efficient and cost effective. 1.3 Discuss the key drivers for achieving an integrated supply chain strategy in Meditech Surgicals? (Assessment Criteria 1.3: Discuss the key drivers for achieving an integrated supply chain strategy in an organization) Supply Chain Management is an integrating philosophy to manage the total flow of a distribution channel from supplier to ultimate customer (Ellrarn & Cooper, 1993). The key drivers for achieving an integrated supply chain strategy in Meditech surgicals are:
An efficient customer service management process: Customer service management is vital to the success of any organization since it acts as an important source of customer information and satisfaction. On the other hand, the customer also gets accurate information on new products and their availability through interactiion with the production and distribution functions.
Well co-ordinated procurement: Demand forecasting reports are shared with suppliers to assist the manufacturing process and new product development. This results in a reduced product development cycles and effective inventory management. With the advent of technology, e commerce interactive portals can help suppliers stay updated on the upcoming demands.
Innovative product development and customization: Integration of suppliers and customers into this process is paramount. This reduces production cycle times and the products reach faster to the market. This gives a lot of time for effective customization of the products to meet the varied customer needs.
Manufacturing and distribution: A flexible and adaptive manufacturing process is needed to meet the ever changing demands for quantities and mass customizations. When the manufacturing cycles are shortened, products are delivered faster and lead to better customer satisfaction. The finished products reach the distributors in a shorter period of time and hence they too don’t find it necessary to do panic ordering.
Warehousing: The concept of decentralized warehousing assists in timely distribution by reducing wait times and transportation delays. However, it is imperial to enhance communications between distributors, regional warehouses and the central warehouse so that demand forecasting and delivery are accurate and there are no cases of inflated demands which cause unnecessary load on production processes.
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Issues in Global Business and Strategic Concepts Case Study Analysis of Hewlett-Packard (HP)
Executive Summary
In the contemporary business environment no organization is left untouched by the impact of globalization. Globalization is both a blessing and curse for organizations. It is mainly because with globalization companies are offered a number of scopes to expand and gain long term sustainability. But at the same time it raises a number of global issues that act as hindrance and thus adoption of successful strategies to overcome the same are highly critical. In this paper the case of Hewlett-Packard (referred to as HP from now on in this paper) is discussed in details with regards to global issues faced by the company, solutions crafted by them to overcome such issues, evaluation of solutions and finally proposing suggestions based on analysis. Based on analysis it was discovered that the major issues confronted by HP are four-fold. They are namely, ineffective strategic expansion through inorganic measures, cultural diversities, inabilities to cope up with changing nature of global business and lack of innovation and entrepreneurship skills. In order to combat these issues, HP has resorted to a number of strategies. Some of these strategies were successful like management of cultural diversities whereas others failed to achieve desired objectives. Upon in-depth analysis it was also revealed that mostly it is internal inabilities of HP that prohibits the company from overcoming global issues. The study finally proposes that HP needs to pursue turnaround strategy along with adoption of practices like lean management, transparent communication systems, whistle blowing and investments in research and development to support innovation for sustaineddevelopment in long run.
Introduction Hewlett-Packard, one of the prominent global IT giant has its roots in a rented car garage in Palo Alto by two Stanford classmates, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Initially, with the impending resources constraints, the firm instigated with audio oscillators required in sound engineering but gradually over the years, through innovation and leadership, it developed a product portfolio encompassing hardware, software and allied services to an expansive clientele of both large and small and medium sized enterprises from public and private sectors across the globe (HP 2015) . From its inception in 1939, the company has evolved across seven business vertices: “Personal Systems, Printing, Enterprise Group, Enterprise Services, Software, HP Financial Services and Corporate Investments” and ranks 35 th in the latest list of most valuable brands of the world by the Forbes Magazine (Forbes 2015) . The firm is currently being spearheaded by Ms. Margaret Whitman as the CEO (Forbes 2015) . However, HP has its share of hardships and challenges as well especially emerging from the globalized economic business landscape where markets are approaching saturation, competition is getting intensified and technology is evolving at a rapid pace. Innovation is regarded as the sole saviour (Gault 2010; Atkinson & Ezell 2012) . This report presents that key strategic issues confronted by the IT titan and how the firm has succumbed to its wrong decisions and dubious strategic moves. The report explores each of the issue in-depth while critically analysing the firm’s subsequent strategies based on a thorough secondary investigation based on management theories and business information.
Background to Case Study
5 | Page As per the reports of Gartner (2015) , HP was the global number one firm in personal computer manufacturing from 2007 to the second quarter of 2013. It was then, Lenovo surpassed it. This is just the tip of the ice berg. The problems at HP are much graver. Strategic management has emerged as one of the most critical functions of contemporary organisations. Top level managers make strategies to tackle issues and complexities imposed by the excessively dynamic and complex businesses environment (SRINIVASAN 2014; Hitt et al. 2012; Orcullo 2008) . The decisions firms make for business have repercussions for years (Hitt et al. 2012) . HP is no exception to this. Firstly, it acquired Compaq Computer in 2001 in anticipation of leveraging the PC market globally and outshining the Asian counterparts. Strangely, the decision makers ignored the by now matured PC market and absence of internal innovation system at Compaq. Further, in 2010, HP again acquired financial crisis stricken Palm as a gateway to the emergent mobile devices market. This served no purpose as HP was a follower of Apple and Palm brought its own plethora of issues. Similar blunder was acquisition of software company Autonomy. HP wanted to ride on external sources of innovation and ignored the importance of internal innovation practices (Mourdoukoutas 2011) . Other strategic issues were that CEOs were getting changed quite often (four CEOs in seven years); HP’s tablet PC was a total flop and uncertainty about the key business segment: personal computers. There was a lot of internal unrest, feuds and scams etc. that made HP miss out on business opportunities. This led to the trajectory of declining revenues and bereaved market share (Bandler 2012) . These issues clubbed with extravagant acquisitions led to a massive downsizing initiative. This was also attributed to unnecessary focus on cost-cutting rather than innovation (Kalb 2012) . The case report explores these issues in light of the strategic management literature to bring out the impact of the strategic decisions that led to the misery of this renownedIT firm and also
6 | Page focusing on remedial measures through which HP can regain its glory through innovation for which it is was always known.
Methodology of Analysis The case is analysed on the basis of the data and information acquired from the secondary sources like published journal, article, books, literature review, articles published in magazines and newspapers. Only popular and authentic sources of information have been referred and duly acknowledged in the paper. Blogs and unworthy websites, books, journals have been ignored. Facts and figures are reported only based on company’s website, newspapers, business consultancies and government’s official websites. The analysis of the issues have been done through the case study mechanism where each issue is explained, linked with relevant theories and literature and then a solution is proposed based on the inferences.
Issues and Problems Out of a number of issues faced by organizations like HP while undertaking business in a global platform some of the most critical ones are identified and discussed in this section. These issues primarily relate to four major areas strategic expansion through acquisition, cultural diversities, changing nature of global business management and innovation and entrepreneurship.
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Global Issues Affecting HP
Management of Cultural Diversity in Workforce
Frequently Changing CEO’s and Focus on Cost reduction against Innovation
Mass- Customization due to dynamic customer tastes and preferences
Ineffective Strategic Alliances and Acquisitions
Figure 1 Global Issues Affecting HP Source: Author
Strategic expansions are a road to market development and product development which helps companies to diversify their risks by thus gain long term sustainability. HP too in lieu of diversifications and expansions underwent a number of strategic alliances. But these alliances and acquisitions in many circumstances left the company in utter dismay (Bandler & Burke 2012) . A number of acquisitions by HP namely of companies like Autonomy, EDS, Palm, and Compaq resulted in huge losses for the company within a short span of time. The consequences were downfall of company’s market value. Though HP paid out 25 billion USD for acquiring Compaq but had to write it off in only 1.2 billion USD (Nuttall 2012) . Similarly, in 2012, in spite of the fact that HP paid 14 billion USD for acquiring EDS in 2008 but it was written off for only 8 billion USD (Nuttall 2012) . These two instances depict inability of HP to take right decisions to support strategic expansions through strategic alliances.
The second issue that was faced by HP in global arena was managing with dynamic consumer tastes and preferences. For companies in order to excel in global markets standardization is generally considered to be a preferable option (Powers & Loyka 2007) . But as HP planned to cater international markets, it was challenged with the problem of customized consumer requirements. The consumers not only sought for quality products but they also wanted tailor- made products that too with faster deliveries (Feitzinger & Lee, 1997 ; Huang et al, 2015) . Tailoring of products for consumers which are spread across the world at cost effective prices was highly challenging for HP. These changing customer requirements affected all business lines of HP ranging from computers to printers to medical related products. Thirdly, while operating successfully in international markets, HP has been also exposed to issues related to cultural diversities and business ethics. During its initial period, HP was facing problems related to understanding and managing diversities among employees culture that was prevalent within the company. It was mainly because people from differing cultures, origin and expertise from across the world were working for HP (Kamal & Ferdousi 2009) . Presently the organization employs more than 3 lakh people across the world and thus management of diversity is highly critical.
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Figure 2 Number of employees in HP between year 2001 to 2014
Source: (Statista 2015)
Another major issue faced by HP is related to entrepreneurship and innovation. Being in an industry that is exposed to dynamic business environment and is completely driven by technology, innovation is the key to its success (Brem & Voigt 2009) . But in many instances, it has been observed that the policies of HP were more driven by cost minimization rather than focusing on innovation (Kalb 2012) . As a result of which HP’s investment in research and development was reduced to a large extent. The major reasons put forward for the same was enhancement of organizational efficiency through massive cost reductions. Even Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) in HP have been changed very frequently which has affected its operations in global markets to a greater degree (Thibodeau 2012) . It is due to this a number of investors have switched over dumping HP’s share resulting a loss of approximately 60 billion USD in two years between 2010 to 2012 (Hartung 2012) .
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Solution To recover from problems identified above that have affected HP vehemently since a long time, the company has undertaken a number of steps to overcome the same. It is due to these measures that HP has been yet able to manage its position within top 10 among Fortune 500 companies (Bandler & Burke 2012) . For overcoming issues related to mass-customization through minimized costs, HP set up manufacturing and designing units in economies where cost of production is low primarily due to abundance availability of resources at lower costs (Porter 2008) . These countries were mainly those who belonged to Pacific Rim along with Indian subcontinent (Pearson Higher Education n.d.) . This helped the company to produce customized computers and servers at lower prices by capitalizing on costs related to human resources, taxes and impediment in shipping. Further such set ups helped HP to enhance efficiency in form of augmented production along with innovative designs, quality development and effective distribution mechanisms. Such activities helped HP in overcoming wastefulness that was acting as a hindrance in organization’s global operations ultimately resulting in enhancement of competitive edge (Porter 2008) . Management of diversity in HP has always been a major concern. With changing times and dynamics of diversities in workforce, HP has also been responsive towards them (refer annexure 1) and designed new strategies to cater diversities as depicted in figure below.
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Figure 3 HP Way of Diversity Management Source: (Kamal & Ferdousi 2009)
In order to support a strong work culture in HP that is free from all diversities related issues the company designed ‘open corporate policy’, ‘management by objectives’ and ‘management by walking around’ (Menke et al. 2006) . These policies were also adopted by the organization to support development of a culture that would in turn support innovation. Though HP has been suffering from a number of issues but under the leadership of its new CEO, Meg Whitman, the company has been able to stabilize its activities (Merchant 2012) . The company has enhanced efficiency and has been able to minimize costs also. Further under new leadership the organization has adopted ‘Turnaround’ strategy that will fetch HP with long term profitability and sustainability (Merchant 2012) . It is this innovation that motivated company to depart from its core business and venture into markets related to cloud, solutions and software were expected to fetch the company with higher profitability through increased margins (Dediu 2013) . Innovation has always been the driving factor for HP which is the reason behind emergence of Silicon Valley but then the same needs to be revived. Thus under the new strategic
12 | Page orientation, HP would focus on HP Multi Jet Fusion Technology and Sprout that will aid the company to rejuvenate its existence and thus gain long term sustainability (Moorhead 2014) . The benefits from these innovative technological solutions are yet to be realized (Moorhead 2014) . Irrespective of this fact, these innovative approaches are expected to revive HP’s declining position.
Evaluation The present position of HP can be evaluated using the (Boston Consulting Group) BCG Model. The model is a matrix of 2×2 which depicts the position of a firm / product / service in terms of market share and market growth as depicted in diagram below.
In current situation HP which is predominantly operating in markets of personal computers is considered to be a market experiencing lower growth. In order to compete in the same, HP resorts to lower profit margins for sustaining competitive pressures (Kalb 2012) . Based on such facts it can be stated that presently HP is operating in the Dog category. This indicates presence of very minimum scope for the company in future if continued to do business in the same
13 | Page segment. The company is having a tough time in surviving with such a product portfolio. Further when the main priority of HP should be adoption of retrenchment strategy, HP on the contrary has been resorting to growth and diversification strategies. It is evident from the number of strategic acquisition that has been executed by HP. Retrenchment strategies provides an organization with opportunities to condense organizational operations and thus concentrate on selected few that will support company with long run financial stability and sustainability (Schermerhorn 2010) . In addition to the above without innovative approaches, it is almost impossible for HP to revive its position in such industry. The organizational system of the company is very intricate making it difficult for CEOs to understand the same (Enderle 2011) . Before they are in a position to understand and act, a new CEO emerges which has adversely affected HP’s growth and culture. Thus the major issue that is affecting HP is lack of effective leadership. None of the entrepreneurs so far who have been leading the organization have been able to prove their entrepreneurial skills as classified by the entrepreneurship model depicted below.
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