When an organization has decided that they want someone else to provide goods or services, they will outsource to another organization. The organization/party that is purchasing the goods or services is known as the?

1 With regard to Arousal Theory, what is the Inverted U Function (Yerkes-Dodson Law)? Explain?

2 . Describe proposed physiological/ neurological functions of dreaming.

1. Your sales or revenue forecast will be an important and key element for any business plan. If you were to forecast the sales for Year 1 through Year 3 what would be the variables you would need to consider and where might you go to research and obtain the data on which to base your forecast?

A project to build a new bridge seems to be going very well since the project is well ahead of schedule and costs seem to be running very low. A major milestone has been reached where the first two activities have been totally completed and the third activity is 60 percent complete. The planners were only expecting to be 50 percent through the third activity at this time. The first activity involves prepping the site for the bridge. It was expected that this would cost $1,420,000 and it was done for only $1,300,000. The second activity was the pouring of concrete for the bridge. This was expected to cost $10,500,000 but was actually done for $9,000,000. The third and final activity is the actual construction of the bridge superstructure. This was expected to cost a total of $8,500,000. To date they have spent $5,000,000 on the superstructure. Calculate the schedule variance, schedule performance index, and cost index for the project to date. How is the project going?

As discussed in this chapter, the characteristics of ser- vices affect the development of marketing mixes for ser- vices. Choose a specific service and explain how each marketing mix element could be affected by these ser- vice characteristics.

H&M, a Fashion Giant, Has a Problem: $4.3 Billion in Unsold Clothes

In the world of fashion retailing, where shopping is fast moving online and stores try to keep inventories closely matched to sales, even a small stack of unsold clothes can be a bad sign. What about a $4.3 billion pile of shirts, dresses and accessories? That is the problem facing H&M, the Swedish fashion retailer, which is struggling with a mounting stack of unsold inventory.

H&M outlined the buildup in its latest quarterly report on Tuesday, prompting questions of whether the company is able to adapt to the fierce competition and changing consumer demands reshaping the global apparel market. Signs of its expanding unsold inventory began emerging last year, when it reported an unexpected quarterly drop in sales. The decline was the first in two decades, a period in which H&M expanded from a lone women’s wear store west of Stockholm to a gargantuan network of 4,700 stores around the world.

Foot traffic in the past year fell as customers eschewed crowded shop floors in favor of online shopping, or lower-cost offerings elsewhere, a challenge hitting a wide array of “fast fashion” retailers. On Tuesday, the company said the pile of unsold stock had grown 7 percent in the past year and was now worth nearly 35 billion Swedish kronor. The scale of the problem illustrates H&M’s vast size — as one of the world’s largest clothing manufacturers, it produces hundreds of millions of items each year. There are so many that a power plant in Vasteras, the town where H&M founded its first store, relies partly on burning defective products the retailer cannot sell to create energy.

Analysts have been pressing Karl-Johan Persson, the company’s chief executive, over the issue. Inventory levels were up, Mr. Persson said, because H&M was opening 220 new stores and expanding its e-commerce operations, and so needed to fill the racks. Critics, however, blamed poor inventory management and underwhelming product offerings, prompting once-loyal shoppers to take their wallets elsewhere. The company said operating profit fell 62 percent in the three months through February, sending its shares to their lowest closing price since 2005 on the Stockholm stock exchange.

It is the latest in a series of issues for H&M. The company had to close stores in South Africa and faced a social media backlash after it ran an ad in January showing a black child model wearing a hooded sweatshirt that said, “Coolest monkey in the jungle.” Also, it and other retailers in Europe are girding themselves for an expected push by Amazon into clothing retailing, one that Amazon has already been making in the United States.

Since the early 2000s, business has largely boomed for fast fashion retailers such as ASOS, H&M and Inditex, which owns Zara. They profited off their ability to generate, at a vast scale, rapid translations of runway fashions into low-priced clothing and accessories. But while luxury brands have enjoyed a rebound in fortunes in recent months, fueled by millennial appetite and a recovery in demand from the lucrative Chinese market, mass-market companies have had to deal with enormous changes. In the digital era, the challenges around offering trendy apparel before it goes out of style have mounted, particularly as growing numbers of shoppers choose to buy from their smartphones and become more quality conscious. ASOS is an online-only retailer, and Inditex has managed to ramp up its digital sales. But H&M, which also owns brands like Cos, & Other Stories and Arket, has fallen behind the pack.

Analysts have been downbeat on the Swedish company’s outlook. Rahul Sharma, founder of Neev Capital, called H&M “a slow-motion wreck” after the release of the first-quarter results. Analysts at the Swiss bank UBS said in a note to investors this month that they had come away from an H&M presentation in November “with no clear view on why focus on the core customer had been lost, and what was being done to fix it.” H&M has insisted it has a plan, saying it would slash prices to reduce the stockpile and slow its expansion in stores. It said it hoped its online business would expand 25 percent this year. Still, Mr. Persson, a grandson of H&M’s founder, acknowledged that the rapid transformation of the industry was weighing on his company. “The start of the year,” he said, “has been tough.”

10. How do the concepts of price sensitivity and elasticity of demand impact the sale of clothing & accessories at H&M. Explain your thinking with examples.

8. How H&M could leverage the use of technology to enhance its online and offline channels? List and briefly describe three trends that are currently having the greatest impact on the future of retailing.

6. H&M needs to work on their integrated marketing communications plan, they need to build out a plan for changing people’s behaviors and adding a larger audience. What do you believe are the three best tools for this? Explain how your various tools would work to capture the audience and what you would do to maximize profits. Please provide more details.

Evaluate the strategic choices facing global corporations, including the choice between adopting highly centralized or predominantly decentralized HR policies, with regard to a range of HR issues such as performance management, compensation and diversity and culture.

For questions 1 - 4, please consider the following [fictitious] scenario.

Lehigh Valley Health Network, a not-for-profit health system with 8 hospitals, is considering switching to a project scoring methodology to evaluate project potential for capital allocation purposes. The CEO of the health system, Dr. Brian Nester, believes that such a methodology would help the leadership team get a more complete picture of the implications of different projects, beyond purely financial measures. The goal for any decision support methodology such as this one is to provide a useful tool for decision makers that leads to good decisions consistently. Dr. Nester has hired an analyst (you) to help them out with developing this methodology.

Q1 [10 points].

Propose a set of criteria that the LVHN team could use to evaluate projects for capital allocation. Organize your criteria in appropriate categories or buckets (e.g. you may consider a subset of operational impact criteria, a subset of financial criteria, community impact etc.). Finally, for each criterion in each bucket, provide a 1-3 sentence rationale behind including it in your selection of criteria to be used for evaluation.

Some (hopefully helpful) hints:

• To identify relevant criteria, you may wish to consider the mission and values of the organization, the different stakeholders that may be part of the LVHN community, the various aspects of the organization that may be impacted etc.
• Too many criteria creates a situation where any meaningful comparison becomes difficult; on the other hand, too few criteria may not provide sufficient “resolution” to be able to differentiate between alternative projects. Unfortunately, there is no magic number - hence the need to provide a rationale and think carefully about what criteria should be included. In general, you want to aim for the fewest that you believe capture all relevant dimensions of analysis.
• Finally, for a given criterion, consider the “ability to measure” how well a given project can satisfy it - in the end, a criterion for which we cannot determine how well a project satisfies it is not that useful. Note that it is possible for a specific criterion not to be itself measurable, e.g. “the project increases the level of confidence that the community has in LVHN services” - how would someone measure that? It is, however, possible to see some measurable effects of this, for instance an increase in “second opinion requests” addressed to LVHN physicians (which we could assume to mean that people trust LVHN more and therefore come to LVHN for second opinions).

[Bonus] 0.5 points for each specific metric that you can use to evaluate how a criterion is impacted by a given project - e.g. “increase in # second opinion requests can be used to measure the improvement in community trust in LVHN physicians”.

The Corona spread dropping us out to our homes has impacts on any aspect on the world. Out of all, education has one of the higher importance. With more than 1,6 billion students around the world more than 80% are out of classes according to World Bank resources. On the other hand, even before the spread, education was in an unpromising situation that, only 53% of the 10 years old students understands what the text they read meant. WB calls this 'Learning poverty'. It is almost same at our country. Turkey is one of the worst countries at PISA tests that qualifies the critical education system at OECD countries. I want to find out some ideas (innovations) that would improve the global education system. Remote education, multiplatform sources, inequity, funds, technology, sharing economy, role of parents, social experience, importance of teachers, digital divide are your keywords.

You throw out the idea of working your way up the bureaucracy for obvious reasons. Instead, you decide to go into elected office. You just got elected to the Indiana State Legislature after serving for the past four years on city council. As a new member you are filled with innovative ideas and want to hit the ground running. You ask a colleague where you can find help drafting legislation on agriculture. They reply “well, if you have an idea, go to LSA to write the actual bill. But before you do that, I would go to the Farm Bureau, the major interest group for agriculture in the state, for any information you may need. We tend to get most of our information from interest groups” Why does this make sense in the context of the Indiana Legislature?

Client 2: After apprenticing for another candy maker, I started my first candy business at age 18. Unfortunately, my first attempt at starting a business (as well as my second) was a failure. After a rocky start, my third try was more successful – I have just received a fortune from the sale of my caramel business. During my world travels, I discovered new equipment that makes chocolate and decided to buy it. Today, only the wealthy can afford chocolate. With this new technology, I think I can make a chocolate that everyone can afford. In my mid-thirties, I know very little about making chocolate but I am willing to take the time to learn. I want my life to center on inventing new candies, building this new business, and laying out a new community that will be a wonderful place for the people I hire to live. I prefer to leave day-to-day operations of the company—handling production, sales, marketing and distribution—to someone else.

How would a typical retailer in Southeast Georgia such as Target or Walmart classify the following inventory items (A, B, C)? Why

1. TP
2. Fresh cut chicken breasts
3. Frozen pizza
4. Hydroxychloroquin (in the pharmacy)
5. Milk
6. Hand sanitizer gel
7. Disinfecting wipes
8. Easter candy
9. Motor oil
10. Watches

Would these classifications change? (Explain: When? Why? How?)

How do these classifications impact the store policies used to manage inventory of these items?

leadership: the "great man" traits that make an effective leader, this period range from Circa 450BC to the 1940s.

Thankfully, after lengthy discussions with your Secretary of State, you find a diplomatic solution to the conflict with additional leverage with US NATO allies. You now start planning your first official ceremonial dinner with some of our NATO allies to celebrate the resolution of the international crisis. Does this duty fall under the President being Head of State or Head of Government? How does the President’s role as Head of State and/or Head of Government differ with places like the United Kingdom?

What would it take for jaggery to expand its market and come back to
being the traditional sweetener? Taking into consideration all the factors stated you have to analyze the market by doing both PESTLE
analysis and the 6 Force Model too. Be sure to ask the right questions to consider and tackle all the pain-points of
the jaggery manufacturers.