1. Please Analyze the following case study on the subject of Procurement that involved significant and costly mistakes?

Mini case study – Scottish Parliament: the £431m question

Scotland’s new parliament building cost more than 10 times the original estimate and opened three years behind schedule.                

Official cost estimates changed 10 times and ballooned from the initial £40 million estimate to a final £431 million.

The procurement model chosen for Holyrood in early 1998 has emerged as the root of the problem. A fast-track contracting method known as construction management was used to build the parliament. It works by splitting a large building job into numerous smaller packages that are designed, tendered and let independently of one another.

Its main advantage is to speed up construction, because the overall design does not have to be complete before basic building work can begin.

It does not allow a client to know the total cost of a project until well after work has begun. It is considered risky for the client, which is responsible for running each individual package – in this case more than 60.

The project cost escalated from about £40 million in 1997 to £109 million in 1999, £241 million in 2001 and £294 million in 2002, and finally £431 million in February 2004. There were 18,000 design change orders over the five years of construction, combining

to form a three-year delay. Requests for design freezes on three occasions were ignored. The reality is that construction management was the only contract option for a client

wanting to make an early start on a project that was still at the design concept stage.
It is also clear that this was a classic case of procurement expertise being bypassed. The procurement department at the Scottish Office was not involved in the project. It was

not consulted over the procurement model.
There is nothing wrong with construction management as a procurement route. It is

best suited to high-quality, potentially high-cost projects, where the client is fully engaged, has a clear goal and works closely with the supply side team.

Some estimates put the money lost to delays and backtracking over design changes at as much as £100 million. If one trade contractor has a problem, it tends to ripple through all the others and cause delay and changes. The contracts are with the client, so the client picks up the cost of that.

However, between the extremes of fixed speedy construction management, a host of options exist under the heading of ‘conventional’ procurement. Their structures affect the risk and control over the final design that falls to the client.

The ‘design and build’ route would have seen the project management team drawing up a detailed design brief, which the main contractor then builds. It leaves the contractor footing the bill for cost overruns, but freezes the design as well.

A middle-of-the-road option, prime contracting, keeps design more open, but cuts the risk of costs going up if things go wrong. This is because a contractor joins the client’s project management team, and brings its entire supply chain of proven builders and suppliers along.

Then there is management contracting, where the client retains the design brief fully and splits up the project into small packages to be individually let, as in construction management. However, a professional intermediary runs all of the contractors on a daily basis, although they are still contracted to the client, which pays for design alterations.

Management contracting may, it seems, have given a more stable framework to the project by introducing an industry expert to run the many contractors.

Construction management was not the most suitable procurement vehicle. Sir Michael Latham, whose influential 1994 report, ‘Constructing the Team’, called on the construction industry to move towards partnering in the supply chain, says that full partnering should have been used to share the risk between client and contractor.

In at least 500 of your own words, explain the difference between qualified and nonqualified plans. Next, what are defined benefit and contribution plans? Finally, what are three broad classes of health insurance programs? Why are all these important to an employee?

This is a Combinatorics question.

Find a generating function for a sub r, the number of ways:

(1) To distribute ridentical objects into seven distinct boxes with an odd numbet of objects not exceeding nine in the first three boxes and between four and ten in the other boxes.

1. What is money and list the three functions of money? Which function is the most important?

2. Describe the organizational structure and functions of the Federal Reserve Syste

3. What is the difference between money market instruments and capital market instruments?

QUESTIONS

The aggregate demand curve portrays the relationship between price level and real GDP. What are the three reasons this relationship is a negative or inverse relationship? Provide brief illustrations of each.

Chapter 14&15 Aggregate Demand and Aggregate Supply

Two cars start moving from the same point. One travels south at 56 mi/h and the other travels west at 42 mi/h. At what rate is the distance between the cars increasing three hours later?b\

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4. Using internet sources, find three automobile manufacturers in the world (for example, Toyota, Mercedes, Ford). Work out the kind of the marketing activities and brands they use in each continent and summarize their global strategy in terms of similarities and differences between the continents.

SQL statements are divided into three major categories: Data Definition Language (DDL), Data Manipulation Language (DML), and Data Control Language (DCL). Explain the differences between DDL, DML, and DCL commands, and provide practical examples of each.

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5.      What organization that would qualify as a sustainable organization (i.e. practicing sustainable entrepreneurship), explain why?   

6.       Explain how three dimensions makes an organization to be sustainable?