DRIVING ARI FLEET MANAGEMENT WITH REAL-TIME ANALYTICS Automotive Resources International, better known as simple ARI, is the world's largest privately-held company for vehicle fleet management services. ARI is headquartered in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey and has 2,500 employees and offices throughout North America, Europe, the UK and Hong Kong. The company manages more than 1,000,000 vehicles in the US, Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Europe. Businesses that need vehicles for shipments (trucks, vans, cars, ships, and rail cars) may choose to manage their own fleet of vehicle or they may outsource fleet management to companies such as ARI which specialize in these services. ARI manages the entire life cycle and operation of a fleet of vehicles for its customers, from up-front specification and acquisition to resale, including financing, maintenance, fuel management, and risk management services such as driver safety training and accident management. ARI also maintains six call centers in North America that operate 24/7, 365 days a year to support customers' drivers, and suppliers who expect access to real-time actionable information. Providing this information has become increasingly challenging. Operating a single large commercial vehicle fleet generates high volumes of complex data, such as data on fuel consumption, maintenance, licensing and compliance, A fuel transaction, for example, requires data on state taxes paid, fuel grade, total sale, amount sols, and time and place of purchase. A simple brake job and preventive maintenance checkup generates dozens of records for each component that is serviced. Each part and service performed on a vehicle is tracked using American Trucking Association codes. ARI collects and analyzes over 14,000 pieces of data per vehicle. Then multiply the data by hundreds of fleets, some with up to 10,000 vehicles, all operating simultaneously throughout the globe, and you'll have an idea of the enormous volume of data ARI needs to manage, both for itself and for its customers. ARI provided its customers with detailed information about their fleet operations, but the type of information it could deliver was very limited. For example, ARI could generate detailed reports on line-item expenditures, vehicle purchases, maintenance records, and other operational information presented as simple spreadsheets, charts, or graphs, but it was not possible to analyze all the data to spot trends and make recommendations. ARI was able to analyze data customer by customer, but it was not able to aggregate data across its entire customer base. For instance, if ARI was managing a pharmaceutical company's vehicle fleet, its information systems could not benchmark that fleet's performance against others in the industry. That type of problem required too much manual work and time, and still didn't deliver the level of insight management thought was possible. What's more, in order to create reports, ARI had to go through internal subject matter experts in various aspects of fleet operations, who were called "reporting power users". Every request for information was passed to these power users. A request for a report would take 5 days to fill. If the report was unsatisfactory, it would go back to the report writer to make changes. ARI's process for analyzing its data was extremely drawn out. In mid-2011, ARI implemented SAP BusinessObjects Explorer to give customers the enhanced ability to access data and run their own reports. SAP BusinessObjects Explorer is a business intelligence tool that enables business users to view, sort and analyze business intelligence data. Users search through data sources using an iTunes-like interface. They do not have to create queries to search the data and results are shown with a chart that indicates the best information match. The graphical representation of results changes as the user asks further questions of the data. In early 2012, ARI integrated SAP BusinessObjects Explorer with HANA, SAP's in-memory computing platform that is deplorable as an on-premise appliance (hardware and software) or in the cloud. HANA is optimized for performing real-time analytics and handling very high volumes of operational and transactional data in real time. HANA's in-memory analytics queries data stored in random access memory (RAM) instead of on a hard disk or flash storage. Things started happening quickly after that. When ARI's controller wanted an impact analysis of the company's top 10 customers, SAP HANA produced the result in 3 to 31/2 seconds. In ARI's old systems environment, this task would have been assigned to a power user versed in using reporting tools, specifications would have to be drawn up and a program designed for that specific query, a process that would have taken about 36 hours. Using HANA, ARI is now able to quickly mine its vast data resources and generate predictions based on the result. For example, the company can produce precise figures on what it costs to operate a fleet of a certain size over a particular route across specific industries during a certain type of weather and predict what the impact of changes in any of the variables. And it can do so nearly as easily as providing customers with a simple history of their expenditures on fuel. With such helpful information ARI provides more value to its customers. HANA has also reduced the time required for each transaction handled by ARI's call centers- from the time a call center staffer takes a call to retrieving and delivering the requested information-5 percent. Since call center staff account for 40 percent of ARI's direct overhead, that time reduction translates into major cost savings. ARI plans to make some of these real-time reporting and analytic capabilities available on mobile devices, which will enable customers to instantly approve a variety of operation procedures, such as authorizing maintenance repairs. Customers will also be able to use the mobile tools for instant insight into their fleet operations, down to a level of detail such as a specific vehicles's tire history. Question: summarize this article in 4 paragraphs using your own words.

Many organizations today are involving lower-level employees in control. Give at least two examples of specific actions that a lower-level worker could do to help his or her organization better adapt to environmental change.

Assume you live in a mid-size city in United states, in the State of Texas. You are starting a healthy energy drink company. Targeting the fitness community in your area. Develop a diagram of the facility layout and justify your layout choice. Show how the product flows through the facility from raw materials to finished product. Diagram should reflect space requirements for each function (machine, operator, and WIP, etc.). Discuss briefly, what happens at each station, and show output at each station (pieces per hour or similar measure). How will you utilize “just-in-time”concepts in your facility? Discuss your Inventory management policies and ERP implementation, if any?

This week we discussed the foundational importance of human rights to ethical choices and policies. What are some of the key human rights that intersect with your Course Project topic (My topic is Wind Power as Alternative Energy? How do you engage with human rights in your section draft that is due this week?

below is the draft that i need to submit this week in order for you to answer the question

this week i have and Individual Draft to take our and your team one step closer to your final Team Project. The draft should reflect the progress you have made in completing each milestone related to the Course Project in the earlier weeks, synthesize ideas you and your team members have developed, and highlight the key areas of analysis you have identified throughout the course.

the draft must also include a brief paragraph that explains the part of the Team Project (Alternative Energy) and where your draft will fit into the final paper.

give the reference

Please Need 1000 words on it

Subject Name: Project Management

Required:

Identify any one of maturity models (listed below), research and explain with an example.

- Center for business practices

- Kerzner’s project management maturity model

- ESI International’s project framework

- SEI’s capability maturity model integration

Envision yourself as the CEO/President of an organization with full responsibility to the company, management, shareholders, creditors, regulators, and the general public. Develop a philosophy regarding internal controls for the organization. The polar extremes are 1) “Keep employees/management away from temptation”, whereby the internal controls are very well-defined, or 2) employees/management will follow the good judgment of their leader, whereby you set a good example and trust is the theme until employees do something to betray that trust. As you develop this philosophy, provide 10 examples (from issues in our chapters, fraud events in the news, to justify your philosophy.

(URGENT) Inditex's International Strategy

Inditex is a Spanish company started more than forty years ago, which owns Zara and other brands. The first Zara store was opened in La Coruña in 1975. The founder of Inditex tends to compare selling fashion to selling fish. A freshly cut garment in the latest colour, like fresh fish, tends to sell quickly at a high price. However, fish caught yesterday must be heavily discounted and may not even sell.

Inditex is the world's largest fashion retailer, followed by H&M Hennes and Mauritz of Sweden. Through Inditex's premier brand, Zara, its clothing has dominated Europe and Asia. It operates across ninety-three countries and has a total number of almost 7,300 stores; of which, 2,200 are Zara stores. It employs 162,450 people. It has invested heavily in its warehouses in its home country, to allow clothing to be packed and dispatched at a faster rate. Inditex continues to grow in all its markets, including the UK—where some rivals, such as Next and Marks & Spencer, have found competing difficult. It achieved record financial results for 2016 with net profit of €3.2 billion, on total sales of more than €23 billion. The group also announced plans to give its employees more than €535 million in 201 7, over and above their existing salaries.

Inditex's Business Model

Most fashion companies have their clothes manufactured in China. This provides low cost manufacturing but at the expense of flexibility. Managing a distant supply chain creates an inherent problem. By the time finished clothes are on route from your supplier, the prevailing fashion may have changed. The clothes you place in your retail store can end up looking decidedly out of fashion. Most clothing retailers are forced to continue with plans they developed more than six months in advance. Their clothes are usually made and sent out to stores via a centrally controlled system. This permits only slight local changes and most stores receive similar stock.

At Inditex, every store receives a tailored assortment, right down to the number of T-shirts, delivered twice a week. Just over half the stock will be designed and manufactured less than a month before it hits the store. Prices can vary considerably between countries. Shoppers in Spain, Portugal, and Greece can buy the clothes much as thirty per cent cheaper than elsewhere in Europe or overseas markets such as China or the US. As one director at Inditex put it, “company is global, but we shape everything in a very exclusive way to individualize it and shape the store to the customer's needs.”

Part of Inditex's business model is a reliance on communication and collaboration. The store's stock is developed in partnership between designers, country managers based at the brands' HQs, and the local store. This level of collaboration allows everyone to feedback ideas about what customers want and don’t want. The business is configured in a way that allows decisions to be made from the bottom to the top, not just in the stores, but throughout the supply chain. Just over half of Inditex's product is only ever produced in relatively small amounts; even if something is incredibly successful, it will never be reproduced exactly again. Designers find versatile fabrics that can easily work as well in a skirt as a jacket to help facilitate Inditex's flexible approach.

Unlike other clothing manufacturers, Inditex does not advertise. Its avoidance of advertising is party driven by its manufacturing model, which relies on constantly changing its garments. This precludes placing advertisements in magazines or billboards which require a lead time of weeks or month. However, website can be updated every day, reflecting real-time changes. Instead, it relies upon smart locations and regularly updating the look of its stores. It is one of the main areas of capital expenditure for Inditex, with 300 to 400 stores a year to renovate. While competing clothing retailers struggled, Inditex reported a ten per cent rise in sales in 2016, after it had invested €1.4 billion in its warehouses, technology, new stores, and online expansion.

As part of the decision-making process for the Zara brand managers, for each country monitor computer screens at headquarters filled with sales data and talk to store managers or regional directors by phone. Managers are helped by computer algorithms, developed in partnership with Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The use of computer technology helps Zara to get the right mix of sizes for stores. Although managers are guided by these automatic suggestions, they have autonomy to adjust everything manually, according to local feedback and market knowledge.

Over ninety-five per cent of Zara's collections are sold internationally. That said, there are still regional differences. For example, Zara's clothes in Germany tend to be a bit sporty; in Russia, they might wear a pencil skirt with high heels, but in the UK it would be worn with a brogue. At the same time, as different stores around the world are selling similar fashions, Zara stores around the corner from each other might be selling different items of clothing. It's all dictated by their shoppers. Staff at head office can make adjustments for products in as little as three weeks in advance, using production in or close to Europe; primarily Turkey, Spain, and Portugal.

At headquarters in Arteixo, there are eleven factories owned by Inditex producing goods for the Zara brand. Inditex's capability lies in skilled jobs, such as cutting out garment pieces, clothing design, and logistics; all of which it keeps in-house. It owns just two or three per cent of its manufacturing capacity. The sewing of fabric pieces is undertaken by more than 100 nearby partner factories that make pieces sent from the Inditex-owned factories into finished clothes.

Many have referred to this as 'fast fashion'. Executives at Inditex insists: 'It's not fast, it's more accurate. What's fast is the logistics, and the moment of creation must be close to what customers are saying. To be quick is easy. But that is not our model. Everything we do is trying to think inside the skin of the customer. It's more expensive, but you get more loyalty from the customers and more flexibility, more accuracy.

Another of Inditex's capabilities is its distribution system. In Arteixo, all Inditex's factories are linked to its distribution centre by tunnels and a 200-km network of ceiling rails on which 50,000 garments a week from each factory flow around on hangers. Basic items of clothing made in Asia are gathered in Spain, before being sorted for individual stores. The model may be under some pressure since Asia overtook Spain as the biggest source of sales. Routing all its products to a small town in Spain to be sorted, may require changing this to a small town in China. Inditex's Business model appears quite straightforward; which begs the question—why has it not been successfully copied?

Questions (URGENT)

1. What type of international strategy would you say Inditex is following? Justify your answer.
2. What is Zara’s business strategy? Explain.

The relationship between leadership, ethical business practices, social responsibility, cultural differences, and global marketplace success. Can this be used to introduce new strategies for an organization? (Must be 250 words) International Marketing Ethical Considerations Research Paper

Watch one hour of a network selling channel (QVC or Home Shopping Network) or watch at least an hour-long infomercial. This is essentially the introduction area where the analysis needs to explain where the selling was observed (cable, youtube, etc.). Identify who the host was by name, what time you watched and how you watched. As well, go over the brand(s) and product(s) being sold during your hour of observation.

Please summarize the passage below in at least 225 words.

Recognizing the limitations of the generic truck weight data and conservative assumptions made during the calibration of live load factors for bridge rating, the AASHTO load and resistance factor rating (LRFR) manual for bridge evaluation provides sufficient flexibility and allows state agencies to adjust the live load factors based on their individual conditions and site-specific or state-specific information. This paper describes a reliability-based process that can be followed to perform such adjustments and illustrates its application using an example in which the procedure was followed during the calibration of a LRFR methodology for New York State bridges. This methodology is applied to the rating of existing bridges, posting of understrength bridges, and checking of permit trucks. The live load models used during the calibration are based on weigh-in-motion data collected from several representative sites. The LRFR live load factors developed using the proposed calibration process would provide uniform and consistent levels of bridge safety and reliability for the bridge classes and configurations targeted. The target reliability levels used during the calibration should reflect the experience gained by state bridge engineers from evaluation of existing bridges under current loading conditions.

(International Marketing Ethical) The relationship between leadership, ethical business practices, social responsibility, cultural differences, and global marketplace success. Is the business practice and process applicable, feasible, or ethical in the cultural climate of the country (or countries) of operation? (Must be 250 words)

Below are some of the specific activities performed in a monetary unit sampling application. Indicate, using the correct letter, which major step in monetary unit sampling application is most closely associated with the specific activity. Each step is associated with only one activity.

A) Define the population.

B) Determine the objective of sampling.

C) Measure sample items.

D) Select the sample.

E) Define the attribute of interest.

F) Determine sample size.

G) Evaluate sample results.

Estimating the expected misstatement and tolerable misstatement.

                                                                                                   [ Choose ]EFBACDG

Identifying an example of what type of response from a customer constitutes an exception to an accounts receivable confirmation.

                                                                                                   [ Choose ]EFBACDG

Calculating the sampling interval.

                                                                                                   [ Choose ]EFBACDG

Calculating the basic allowance for sampling risk, projected misstatement, and incremental allowance for sampling risk.

                                                                                                   [ Choose ]EFBACDG

Identifying the financial statement assertion(s) of interest in the audit of an account balance or class of transactions.

                                                                                                   [ Choose ]EFBACDG

Determining the completeness of the client's electronic accounts receivable file.

                                                                                                   [ Choose ]EFBACDG

Calculating the tainting percentage.

Discuss the external factors that will influence such Corporate Governance Model

What are the basic “elements of the Effective Governance Model”?

You have two employment candidates for a marketing position. Both have similar educational backgrounds and certifications. However, the first candidate has 20 years of related experience while the second candidate has 6 years of similar experience.

The first candidate is asking for a competitive base salary plus one week extra vacation as part of the benefits package. The second candidate is asking for a competitive base salary plus a company smart phone (upgraded each year), and paid Internet service at home. The first candidate is willing to work a flexible schedule (nights, weekends, etc.), while the second candidate prefers to work remotely from home. Both are requesting to be included in the company's annual bonus plan.

Write a 700- to 1,050-word paper that includes the following:

Compare the direct and indirect compensation requests for each candidate.

As an HR professional, what do you think is the best hiring decision for the company and why?