Can company’s achieve competitive advantage even if they use the same Enterprise Systems? Address this statement in the context of a company of your choice. In providing your answer state why have you chosen the company and discuss whether this company can achieve competitive advantage using the same enterprise systems as their competitors. Please refer to your readings to support your answer.

Internet Extra: Food products firms and fast food restaurants are examples of companies that standardize some elements of the marketing mix, and customize others. For example, Kraft sells its products in several markets around the world. In some markets, Kraft sells virtually identical products, in others, products have been adapted to meet local needs.

Pick a few products and look at how they are sold in other markets. Are product names the same? What differences do you see in product packaging? Are there differences in the products themselves? What do your answers tell you about Kraft’s international marketing strategy?

Dove’s Global ‘Real Beauty’ Campaign
The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty is a worldwide marketing campaign launched

by Unilever in 2004 that includes advertisements, video, workshops, sleepover events and the publication of a book and the production of a play. The aim of the campaign is to celebrate the natural physical variation embodied by all women and inspire them to have the confidence to be comfortable with themselves. Dove's partners in the effort include such marketing and communications agencies as Ogilvy & Mather, Edelman Public Relations, and Harbinger Communications (in Canada) along with other specialized consultants. Part of the overall project was the "Evolution" campaign. Please read the full description from WIKIPEDIA

This case explores how Unilever’s reconfigured its marketing mix for its Dove brand. Historically, Unilever had customized its products and marketing campaigns for each market, a strategy that not only resulted in duplication of effort, but also in organizational complexity. In 2003, Unilever shifted its strategy to develop a more globally standardized approach for Dove. The company now uses a basic message for the brand, and allows some customization at the local level. Discussion of the feature can begin with the following questions:

Discussion Questions

1. How would you describe Unilever’s approach to international markets prior to 2003? What were the advantages of this strategy? What were the drawbacks of this approach?

2. In 2003, Unilever adopted its Real Beauty strategy. Explain how this new strategy differed from its traditional approach to foreign markets? How should this new approach help Unilever’s international sales?

Subject Name: Multinational Management

1 Which of China's advantages in attracting investment from MNCs is the most likely to be imitated?A.Low labor cost B.Perfect infrastructure
C.Efficient logistics network D.Good public security

2 Which of the following options is considered to be the most effective competitive strategy against rivals?A.Preemptive strategies B.End-run offensives
C.Direct attacks D.Acquisitions

3 Which company is mainly focused on the African market?A.Huawei Technology B.Xiaomi C.Tecno Mobile D.Motorola

4 In 2019, Huawei and Samsung developed their own screen foldable smart phones, Huawei Mate X and Samsung Galaxy Fold. Huawei and Samsung were both going all out to be the first producer to launch a practical screen foldable smart phone. Which of the follwing options is not the main reason for this round of competition. A.To strengthen the brand image in the premium sector of smart phone market B.To increase the company's smart phone sales revenue C.To strengthen the relationship with the key suppliers in the industry chainD.To improve the company's voice in the field of app development for foldable screen phones
5 For a multinational manufacturing company, which of the following activities is the worst choice to be outsourced?A.Logistics B.Assembly C.After-sales service D.Human Resource Management
6 It is widely believed that, the international market for most products is......... A.a seller's market B.a buyer's market C.a market where 50% bargaining power for the buyers and sellers each D.it depends
7 Which is the most common tool for a company-situation analysis?A.BCG matrix
B.GE - McKinsey Matrix C.KSFs analysisD.SWOT analysis.
8 If the major competitor uses a differentiation strategy based on high-quality products, what is the best choice for your company to attack it. A.to minimize the production cost B.to improve the quality of products C.to match or exceed that quality at a lower price D.to strengthen the marketing promotion.
9 According to the GE - McKinsey Matrix, what is the suggestion for the business, where the industry attractiveness is medium, and the business unit strenth is low?A.to harvest B.to protect C.to invest
D.to divest.

10 There is no risk in diversification for large Multinational Companies with a long histrory.
A True B False

GOOGLE Started in the late 1990s, Google grew rapidly to become one of the leading companies in the world. Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It is operating on a simple but innovative business model of attracting Internet users to its free search services and earning revenue from targeted advertising. In the winner-takes-all business of Internet search, Google has captured considerably more market share than its next highest rival, Yahoo!. This has turned Google’s Web pages into the Web’s most valuable real (virtual) estate. Through its two flagship programs, AdWords and AdSense, Google has capitalized on this leadership position to capture the lion’s share in advertisement spending. AdWords enables businesses to place ads on Google and its network of publishing partners for as low as 25 cents per thousand impressions. On the other hand, it uses AdSense to push advertisements on publishing partners’ Web sites targeting specific audience and share ad revenue with the publishing partner. This creates a win–win situation for both advertisers and publishers and developed Google into one giant sucking machine for ad revenue. However the European Union recently fined Google $2.7 billion for using its dominant position to favor its own price comparison service, Google shopping. This is illegal under EU law as it is unfair to rivals and denied consumers a real choice among competitor services in thirteen European countries. Even as a large company, Google continues to take risks and expand into new markets. It currently offers over 120 products or services, including google translate, google maps, google+ social network and Android, the worlds most used operating system. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders, declared in Google’s IPO prospectus, “We would fund projects that have a 10% chance of earning a billion dollars over the long term. . . We place smaller bets in areas that seem very speculative or even strange. As the ratio of reward to risk increases, we will accept projects further outside our normal areas.” They further add that they are especially likely to fund new types of projects when the initial investment is small. Google promotes a culture of creativity and innovation in a number of ways. IT encourages innovation in all employees by allowing them to spend 20% of their time on a project of their own choosing, and to switch between project teams. In addition, it offers benefits such as free meals, on-site gym, on-site dentist, and even washing machines at the company for busy employees. Managers have both a portfolio of projects and a portfolio of people to manage: Google has a cross-functional (matrix) organizational structure but with as few middle managers as possible.. Despite open and free work culture, a rigid and procedure-filled structure is imposed for making timely decisions and executing plans. For example, when designing new features, the team and senior managers meet in a large conference room. They use the right side of the conference room walls to digitally project new features and the left side to project any transcribed critique with a timer clock giving everyone 10 minutes to lay out ideas and finalize features. Thus, Google utilizes rigorous, data-driven procedures for evaluating new ideas in the midst of a chaotic innovation process. Google’s vice president for search products and user experience, Marissa Mayer, outlines nine notions of innovations embedded in the organizational culture, processes, and structure of Google. 1. Ideas come from everywhere: Google expects everyone to innovate, even the finance team. 2. “Innovation; not instant perfection”: Google employees can take a good idea and experiment to improve upon it. 
 Google launches early and often in small beta tests, before releasing new features widely. 3. “A license to pursue dreams”: To help promote innovation, Google employees get one “free” 
day each week to work on their pet ideas. Half of new launches come from this ‘‘20% time.’ 4. “Morph projects, don’t kill them”: Google employees should always to find something
salvageable in projects that aren’t pursued 
 5. “Share everything you can”: Google employees have a lot of collective knowledge. To encourage sharing, each employee writes an e-mail on Monday with five to seven bullet points of what they learned earlier and Google then consolidates this information and makes it available to the employees. 
 Every idea, every project, every deadline—it’s all accessible to everyone on the intranet. 6. “Worry about usage and users, not money: Google will be successful if we can please the users; advertisers (and their money) will follow. 
 7. Don’t politic, use data “Data is apolitical”: Mayer discourages the use of ‘‘I like’’ in meetings, pushing staffers to use metrics”: Design is a science at Google. Good ideas must be supported with evidence. 
 8. “Creativity loves constraints”: Google employees work best when they are challenged and have to think outside the box. Give people a vision, rules about how to get there, and deadlines. 
 9. “You’re brilliant? We’re hiring”: Google likes to hire really smart people—even if they may not have a lot of experience.
 Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin approve hires. They favor intelligence over experience. Keeping up with the organizational strategy of Google, its IT department provides free and open access to IT for all employees. Rather than keeping tight control, Google allows employees to choose from several options for computer and operating systems, download software themselves, and maintain official and unofficial blog sites. Google’s intranet provides employees information about every piece of work at any part of Google. In this way employees can find and join hands with others working on similar technologies or features. In building the necessary IT infrastructure, Google’s IT department balances buying and making its own software depending on its needs and off-the-shelf availability. For example, it uses Oracle’s accounting software, whereas it built its own customer relationship management (CRM) software, which it then integrated with its ad systems. It also supports open source projects both by extensively using open source software within the organization and by paying college students to contribute to them through programs like Summer of Code. Google’s Ads Data Infrastructure systems run the multibillion dollar ads business at Google. High availability and strong consistency are critical for these systems. Google builds systems that run in multiple datacenters all the time, and adaptively move load between datacenters, with the ability to handle outages of any scale completely transparently, causing minimal disruption to the operational system. Their F1 system is a distributed relational database system that combines high availability and the scalability of NoSQL systems, and the consistency and usability of traditional SQL databases. Mesa is a petabyte-scale data warehousing system with high availability, reliability, fault tolerance, and scalability for large data and query volumes. In addition, Google also develops generic applications such as GoogleApps for both internal and external use. Given the nature of business, security of information resources is critical for Google. For instance, its master search algorithm is considered a more valuable secret formula than Coca- Cola’s. However, rather than improving IT security by stifling freedom through preventive policy controls, Google puts security in the infrastructure and focuses more on detective and corrective controls. Its network management software tools combined with 150 security engineers constantly look for viruses and spyware, as well as strange network traffic patterns associated with intrusion.

1. Which underlying principles and factors affect Google’s organizational functions and systems in a global environment? 
2

6. What does Google use as information sourcing options, explain your answers

ERP group case analysis assignment:
my part of the requirements:
1)executive summary for the case analysis
2)The motivation for adopting an Enterprise system (ERP) within Cadbury
3)The benefits gained after the implementation of ERP system
4)concluding statements about the implementation of ERP in Cadbury

Cadbury case:

Our first successful ERP implementation case study focuses on Cadbury, a 123 year-old confectioner currently owned by American snack foods conglomerate Modelez International. The company was on an accelerated growth-track while facing problems meeting its production and distribution requirements.

Subsequently, SAP was engaged to resolve these concerns. Along with other significant changes triggered by the ERP implementation; multi-node resources-management was extended throughout its supply-chain, along with a complete revamping of existing warehouse, and distribution processes.

The consequent impacts afforded Cadbury an opportunity to reduce overall operating costs, while its newly engaged supply-chain, produced significantly better production efficiencies throughout its manufacturing chain.

What is the general rule for how MLB players are controlled by their team in terms of arbitratiin and free agency?

Costs that do not change with production level are known as fixed costs

Question 1 options:

Question 2 (1 point)

Payback analysis utilizes a significantly different approach to alternative evaluation than the primary methods of PW, AW, ROR, and B/C. It is possible for payback analysis to select a different alternative than these techniques.  

Question 2 options:

Question 3 (1 point)

Examples of fixed costs are direct labor, materials, and warranty.

Question 3 options:

Question 4 (1 point)

Total Cost= Fixed Costs + Variable Costs

Question 4 options:

Air Canada unveiled its long awaited discount carrier yesterday, but warned that customers shouldn’t expect fares to immediately be lower than those already offered by Air Canada. Steve Smith, president and chief executive officer of Zip Air Inc., said the new airline is being created to cut Air Canada’s costs – not to reduce fares. ‘Right now, the price is already low, particularly in this market,’ he said, adding that prices could fall over time as the new airline reduced expenses.

Observers see the wholly owned subsidiary as a way for Air Canada to lower labor costs and win back market share it has lost in recent years to Calgary-based WestJet Airlines Ltd. Mr. Smith said a new business model is emerging in the airline market – as it has in retailing – where lower-cost, no-frills service becomes the norm. He said the full-service model for short flights is ‘going the way of the dinosaur.’ Zip is aimed at meeting that challenge in the low end of the market, he said.

Zip’s costs will be at least 20 per cent lower than those at Air Canada’s comparable mainline flights, in part because Zip’s employees will be making less money than their counterparts at Air Canada. Mr. Smith said wages will be competitive with Zip’s competitors in the low-cost market. ‘For the employees, they have to understand that they will be working for zip,’ he joked. Pamela Sachs, president of Air Canada component of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, said the union will mount a legal challenge to Air Canada’s attempts to pay so-called B-scale wages to Zip employees. ‘Air Canada gives zip by zapping its employees. They are hurting the very people who have worked so hard for them and for so long,’ she said.

Other cost-cutting measures at Zip include offering snacks instead of meals, providing no in-flight entertainment and operating only one kind of plane. There will also be less room between seats – 32 inches or 33 inches – although the seats will still have more leg room than the smallest seats at WestJet. The reduction, along with the elimination of business-class seats, will allow Zip to add 17 seats to the 100 seats in the Boeing 737-200. (WestJet has 120 seats in its Boeing 737-200s). The company will operate independently of Air Canada, although it will buy maintenance services from its parent, as well as using the larger company’s pilots.

Question: Evaluate the strength and weaknesses of SHRM practices in the organization mentioned in the case.

For a ‘patent’ to be protected by law (patentable), the invention must have a few characteristics.

List the characteristics and explain.

It appears at time that the human resources function is a tool for the corporation to manage benefit packages and, risk aversion, and the like. Should the human resources function be more integrated into the communication process and relationships among the stakeholders within the organization?

Does Title IX apply to all universities, schools and athletic programs? What process should an institution use to determine whether a school is in Title IX complies?

Do you believe that the markets could be developed to receive a new gadget or should the new gadget be developed to meet markets needs? How do you know what are the needs if the gadget is not in the hand of the consumer yet?  

Ethical behavior is a corporate issue that affects the company’s bottom line. How do ethical issues impact organizations and operations? Include an example seen in the workplace, in the news, etc. that relates to real-life situations.