...Oxford Plastics Company manufactures high-quality plastics and resins for many different uses. Jobs through Oxford Plastics were a major part of the economy as well as played an important role in the state by employing about 3,000 community members with high paying factory jobs. With strong support from the community and the state, Oxford performed well since they were perceived by the larger environment to have a legitimate right to exist (pg.188). The idea of investment of normative forces (pg. 192) for a state-of-the-art color lab and paint shop was explored for a better and faster way of matching colors for customers was being considered for implementation within two years, if agreed upon by interorganizational collaboration. Entering the new market for Oxford depended on a multitude of external factors playing against their favor within time constraints. Given the ideal location for the new factory was on 25 acres of several 400-500 year old beech trees and outside their current industrial zoning boundary, many coercive forces were in place. Also, with a non-profit ready to sell the land and the other organization moving slowing on agreement, tight schedules were put into place allowing time for the EPA to set new regulations before the two years and force Oxford to stop using their old process and ultimately shut down the factory. Coercive forces such as these forced Oxford to operate under restrictions and possibly adopt changes that might increase homogeneity and limit...
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...MGT342-001 Oxford Plastics Company Assignment Kenneth A. Goddard Row 2 Sam Henderson is the Beatty plant manager for Oxford Plastics and is the man in charge of finding a way for all interested parties to be happy and satisfied with the new expansion to the current plant located in Beatty. There are a plethora of people and organizations which will be directly impacted by the addition of this new state-of0the-art color lab and paint shop. This addition will add lots of new jobs, help the business to stay competitive with a fast paced global market, and more importantly bring the Beatty plant into full compliance with updated U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations. This expansion necessitates Oxford Plastics purchase 75 adjacent acres of land but the preferred site is causing some definite problems because it would necessitate the destruction of several 400-500 year old beech trees which have become something of a landmark and could be a source of future tourism revenue to the community while also being a focus of May Pinelas, the Chairman of Historic Beatty, and the Save our Future Foundation which has thwarted at least one previous project. Playing the role of Henderson I have decided there is a way that everyone can come out of this situation happy and looking good. First of all Oxford Plastics has to have this expansion and using the site that the upper managers want is important to me and my career. Pacifying the environmentalist and the community around...
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...BALANCE AT OXFORD MANUFACTURING Fiona McQuarrie, University College of the Fraser Valley Oxford Manufacturing is a company with 350 employees in a large Midwestern city. It specializes in producing custom plastic products, although it also manufactures a range of small plastic items (such as storage boxes and water bottles) that it sells to wholesale distributors. Because of the variety of products the firm produces, its workers have a wide range of skill levels and qualifications: engineers with university degrees work on design and production specifications for customized products, and assembly line workers, some of whom did not finish high school, operate machines in the production facility. The company’s plant operates 12 hours a day, seven days a week—although if a large order cannot be produced during regular hours, operating hours may be added to meet that demand. Over the last few years, where Oxford is located, the demand for workers has begun to exceed the supply. Oxford’s owners have realized that the company can no longer afford to sit back and let potential employees find them, as was the case in the past. They also realize that the company is now increasingly competing for employees, especially skilled ones, with other manufacturing firms in the same area. These realities have led Oxford’s owners to decide that Oxford needs to be seen as a “preferred employer” if it is going to attract and retain the best employees. They have decided to make Oxford a preferred...
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...competitive advantage and to gain customer loyalty. But how do we know if a company is really becoming more responsible or if it is just a scam to attract more customers and make more profit? This is when the term greenwashing comes into play; when corporations mislead customers to believe that their operations are responsible, when they actually are not. Throughout this paper the greenwashing case by the internationally known artesian bottled water maker: FIJI Water will be embarked as well as the principles proposed by Jeffrey Hollender in his book “The Responsibility Revolution”, that claims that by following them, corporations can become more responsible. The Oxford Dictionary defines the term greenwash as any “disinformation disseminated by an organization so as to present an environmentally responsible public image”. When a corporation spends more time and money in trying to make their activities look good for they environment than actually implementing the practices to become “greener”, it is said that the corporation is involved in greenwashing ("About Greenwashing"). Now more than ever, greenwashing has become a rising problem. Because corporations now have two choices (either they meet society’s environmentally friendly standards or slowly go out of business), the use greenwashing has become an easy fix for many corporations including big names such as Wal-Mart and Fiji Water. Fiji Water is a company that produces and...
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...about 12 hours of burn time. ● 3 ⅓ lb of wood pellets will last 1 hour ● ~1 lb of wood pellets will last ~20 minutes Four Action Framework The first question forces a company to consider eliminating factors that companies in an industry have long competed on. Often those factors are taken for granted even though they no longer have value or may even detract from value. Sometimes there is a fundamental change in what buyers value, but companies that are focused on benchmarking one another do not act on, or even perceive, the change. ● package/contents structure ● input and construction materials ● distribution channels / efficiencies of scale ● discard process The second question forces a company to determine whether products or services have been over-designed in the race to match and beat the competition. Here, companies over-serve customers, increasing their cost structure for no gain. ● package security ● labeling - brand awareness and instructions for use The third question pushes a company to uncover and eliminate the compromises an industry forces customers to make. ● cost to purchase inputs and produce package vs cost to dispose/recycle ● focus on local package creation, distribution and consumption. The fourth question helps a company to discover...
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...Assess the significance of war in influencing the transformation of approaches to medical treatment and surgery in the period 1870-1990 Throughout 1870-1990, warfare played a crucial role in transforming approaches to medical treatment and surgery as it; prompted more government responsibility in healthcare, innovated technological developments in medicine such as the establishment of blood transfusion services, contributed to individual breakthroughs by catalysing the development, and mass-production of penicillin. However, there's an ongoing historical debate regarding the significance of other factors' influence in transforming approaches to medical treatment and surgery. Other factors include; individuals who used their scientific knowledge to develop new medical treatment and surgical treatments, and the role of the government in enhancing healthcare in Britain. The effects of war were prevalent as early as the Second Boer War; which exposed inadequacies within the healthcare system, instigating increased government awareness towards poor health. Henry Hyndman suggested up to 50% of volunteers were unfit and in Manchester, 8,000 out of the 11,000 who volunteered for the army were rejected as they were physically unsuitable. The public's poor health hindered recruitment for the Boer War alarmed the government. This forced them to respond by establishing the inter-department Committee on Physical Deterioration; which highlighted nutrition as an indicator of the public's...
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...should choose a suitable market entry strategy before they enter India. There are five models of entry, including exporting, licensing, franchising, specialized modes and foreign Direct Investment (Griffin and Pustay, 2013). Appendix table 1 shows advantages and disadvantages of different modes of entry. Foreign Direct Investment is one of the modes of entry and it is suitable entry model for ABC Limited. Because according to compare with them, Foreign Direct Investment maintains more control and high profit potential in Business than others (details in table 1). Foreign Direct Investment refers to an investment made by business enterprise in one country into a company in another country (Oxford Reference, 2009). It...
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...UNIVERSIDAD DE LA SABANA CASO PARA ANÁLISIS: OXFORD PLASTICS COMPANY HECHO POR: MARIA CAMILA CHAPARRO / NICOLÁS CHAPARRO / MARIA ALEJANDRA OVIEDO 08/09/2014 GRUPO: 1 * BACKGROUND AND HISTORY: The company TopDog Software was created by Mary Carpenter and Ari Weiner after he´s been working a leading software company on the West Coast. Its name comes from a pet that they had, an Alaskan Malamute. TopDog Software develops software for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) far superior to other software dedicated to the same subject as it integrates several packages (CRM) and dramatically improves the integration of mass consumer information and makes it immediately accessible to call centers. This breakthrough in software development allowed TopDog Software positioned in the market and hire 28 employees and achieved sales of nearly $ 4 million dollars. * PROBLEMS: The main problem for the company is the need to globalize because there are emerging companies that owns a much higher than TopDog software and they threatening stability in the North American market, for this reason the management team is considering an international strategy for this competition but the problem is that there are disadvantages such as resource scarcity generating the possible expansion is a failure and that none of the managers have international experience which means they would have to hire someone with knowledge of these matters. ¿If such proceeding internationalization...
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...AN ETHICAL DILEMMA 3 (source: Crane A. and Matten D. (2010) Business Ethics.3rd edn. Oxford, p99) Producing Toys – Child’s Play You are the product manager of a confectionery company that includes small plastic toys with its chocolate sweets, Having met a potential Thai manufacturer of these toys at a trade fair in Europe, you now visit the company in the North Eastern part of Thailand to finalize a two-year supply contract. Arriving there and talking to the sales manager you are able to arrange a deal which supplies you with the toys at a third of the cost currently charged by your Portuguese supplier, but with equivalent quality and supply arrangements. In order to check the reliability of the manufacturing process you ask the manager to show you around the place. You are surprised to find out that there is no real workshop on the premises. Rather, the production process is organized such that at 6am, about 30 men line up at the company's gate, load large boxes with toy components on their little carts or-motor-scooters and take the material to their homes. Your prospective supplier then takes you to one of these places where you see a large family, sitting in a garage-like barn assembling the toys. Not only are the mother and father doing the job, but also the couple's six children, aged 5 to 14, who are working busily — and from what you see, very cheerfully — together with the parents, while the grandmother is looking after the food in an adjacent room. In the...
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...AN ETHICAL DILEMMA 3 (source: Crane A. and Matten D. (2010) Business Ethics.3rd edn. Oxford, p99) Producing Toys – Child’s Play You are the product manager of a confectionery company that includes small plastic toys with its chocolate sweets, Having met a potential Thai manufacturer of these toys at a trade fair in Europe, you now visit the company in the North Eastern part of Thailand to finalize a two-year supply contract. Arriving there and talking to the sales manager you are able to arrange a deal which supplies you with the toys at a third of the cost currently charged by your Portuguese supplier, but with equivalent quality and supply arrangements. In order to check the reliability of the manufacturing process you ask the manager to show you around the place. You are surprised to find out that there is no real workshop on the premises. Rather, the production process is organized such that at 6am, about 30 men line up at the company's gate, load large boxes with toy components on their little carts or-motor-scooters and take the material to their homes. Your prospective supplier then takes you to one of these places where you see a large family, sitting in a garage-like barn assembling the toys. Not only are the mother and father doing the job, but also the couple's six children, aged 5 to 14, who are working busily — and from what you see, very cheerfully — together with the parents, while the grandmother is looking after the food in an adjacent room. In the...
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...market grows mature, it accounts for 1% of total GDP of the United States and Canada respectively in 2011. This paper is aimed at critically examining the overall bottled water production and its side effects on human health and environment in North America. It is organized as follows: it discusses where the water from and how it was processed and its affects on health, and government regulations and standards, plus the general energy consumption brought by the production line; then it explores how the used bottles are recycled and disposed; finally it compares the overall quality between bottled water and tab water, and the standards between them. Macroeconomic Approach – The Bottled Water Industry As more and more bottled water company try to...
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...operating system or activities of a company. The business environment is comprised of different factors like customers, competitors, stakeholders, suppliers, laws, regulations and policies of government, social and economic issues, technological advances etc. (http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/business-environment.html) Definition, characteristics and implications of these different environments are discussed below: Placid environment: Placid environment refers to a simple and easy atmosphere under which a company or firm runs its operation. It is a static and stable environment where firms are running their activities and taking strategies based on historical data and feel content that in future continuation of past will occur. Customer demand and sales forecasting are estimated from past records. Organizational goals of such type of companies remain unchanged and straight forward. For example, a tax preparing farm waits eagerly for the end of tax year for calculating tax related works for its clients. Fireworks manufacturer or greeting cards publishers are also in the same category which deals with special festivals every year. In placid environment managerial decisions are not as important as the firms or companies follow hard and fast rules. However, such type of company can get a major shock if the nature of its environment changes quickly. For example, if government imposes restrictions on some types of fireworks, the company faces danger. In such type of situation...
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...weeks. The main item on the agenda, as before, was what decision to take on the proposed New Product Strategy, which arose out of the Consultant's Report commissioned by the Marketing Director. Established in 1740, the company had built up a worldwide reputation for fine household china. Its management was paternalistic, very conservative financially, and committed to preserving company traditions. Yet over the last 10 years the company had extended its product range into industrial porcelains for high-voltage insulation, and it had been very successful. Bill Hawkins, the newly appointed Marketing Director, opened the meeting with an aggressive presentation. At 35, he was a good 20 years younger than anyone else on the Board; and with a Harvard M.B.A., he was the only member of the Board with formal management training. 'I hope that certain members of the Board have reconsidered their positions since our last meeting. As far as 1 am concerned, my recommendations of three weeks ago still stand. Let's go through them once again, shall we? What are the main facts from the Consultant's Report? Let's take them one by one, shall we? (a) At a £4.50 selling price per filter unit, and a market size of 1 million units, the present market size is £4.5 million. (b) One company, Western Ltd, has an estimated 85% market share. (c) The market does not like working under a monopoly, and especially as Western Ltd do not give volume discounts. (d) The number of buying points is estimated at 20...
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...Sources of pollution and mitigation measures Pollution is the introduction of contaminants into the environment that cause harm or discomfort to humans or other living organisms, or that damage the environment. Pollution takes place because; we process, consume and throw away a high volume of material resources at a very high rate. Then the nature’s way of reabsorbing these resources back into its structure and effectively neutralizing them is much slower than our rates of production or consumption. Hence over production; also inefficient and dirty methods of production and consumptions; careless and thoughtless disposal of post consumption waste resources are the major causes of man-cause pollution. There are fundamental drivers of the pollution; these are the major forces behind the surge in levels of air, water and land pollution throughout the globe. These are Industrialization it set in the motion the widespread use of fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal) which are now the mail sources of pollution. Population growth with the exploding increase in the population around the world, the demand for goods and services goes up. This demand is met by expanded production and use of natural resources, which in turn lead to higher levels of pollution. Globalization. It has become an effective facilitator of environmental degradation. Developing countries tend to have loose regulations on pollution levels thus global bigger manufacturers tend to move to these areas rather than...
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...in the hospitality sector in Iberoamerica: Spain, Portugal, and Latin America (concretely, in Chile, Brazil, Peru, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic). Organizational culture and sustainability Sustainability and Organizational Culture There is a nascent body of literature that aims to understand how companies can embed sustainability in their organizational cultures (Howard-Grenville & Bertels, 2012). For these authors, culture has been conceptualized as shared norms or values (reinforced through the role of leaders and ‘‘champions,’’ the allocation of resources, the use of incentives, and the existence of corporate policies), as a frame or filter (that is, as recursive connections between people’s day-to-day actions and the meanings associated with them), and as a toolkit (made malleable by individual actors who use cultural resources in new ways). Among the myriad of conceptualizations available, Ulrich and Brockbank (2005) offer a useful definition of organizational culture: ‘‘the collective mindset of the company, shared ways of thinking and cognitive patterns that define the way people behave’’ (p. 50). So, the identification and classification of behaviors aiming to promote sustainability should be part of a much needed exercise to make multiple expressions of culture—language, artifacts, and...
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