I Need 1500 words on solution a International Management (BUSS 1006)-CW3-Fall-19-QP

Attachment:1

 
International Management (BUSS 1006)-CW3-Fall-19-QP   

BUSS 1006 (QP) Page 1 of 10

Learning outcome: - Recognise solutions for problem decisions for international operations

Instructions to Student:

 Word limit, 1200-1500 words.  Specific submission guidelines should be strictly followed by the student.  Discussion / answers to each task shall carry specific marks as detailed in this case study (CS)  Marks awarded in the assessment are provisional till it is approved by the Exam Board  Submit a soft copy of your CS through Moodle at Turnitin, as per the date specified in the MIG  Feedback will be given orally in class and in writing on Moodle two weeks after final submission  Plagiarism policy is as per the MEC guidelines updated, uploaded on Moodle and presented in class.

This is a research-based assignment, hence each student is encouraged to be involved in research (hard books, online resources, references etc.); arrange appointments if possible, visit the company and ask questions to the right person(s) with respect to his/her assignment and collect relevant information. Student may also consider calling or emailing the company, if needed, as she/he is expected to be resourceful. MEC will definitely help to provide each student with an Industry letter if required.

                                                                                                         Case Study – Fall 2019

Module: International Management (BUSS 1006) ID NUMBER

Level: 5 Max. Marks: 100* Duration: 2 weeks

*: will be scaled down to 35

International Management (BUSS 1006)-CW3-Fall-19-QP

BUSS 1006 (QP) Page 2 of 10

Billion-dollar mistake: How inferior IT killed Target Canada

Unmanageable deadlines and disastrous IT wrecked this top US retailer's attempt at international expansion. The moral of the story: IT drives the enterprise.

  By David Gewirtz for DIY-IT | February 11, 2016 -- 15:08 GMT (15:08 GMT) | Topic: Enterprise Software

Business school case studies tend to fall into two categories: epic wins and oh-my-gosh-how-could-they

possibly-have-been-so-stupid epic failures. This article discusses a real-world billion dollar story that falls into

the second category. As epic failures go, this one is worthy of the history books.

Let's set the scene. Target is one of America's largest and most successful retailers. The 114-year-old company that evolved out of the old Dayton-Hudson company now has more than 1,800 retail locations.

Unfortunately, none of those are in Canada. Anymore. And thus begins our story.

This is a story of hubris, impossible deadlines, and information technology. Yes, as it turns out, if you want to be a worldwide retailer, your information systems are the glue that holds it all together. In Target Canada's case, not so much.

As an American with three Target stores right in our neighborhood, I didn't realize that Target wasn't a worldwide thing. But it's not. Walmart, by contrast, operates something over 11,000 stores in 28 countries. Walmart is a $465 billion company. Target is a $72 billion company, certainly not small potatoes. But Target, it seems, wanted to be more like Walmart.

International Management (BUSS 1006)-CW3-Fall-19-QP

BUSS 1006 (QP) Page 3 of 10

And so, in 2011, the Target Corporation decided to expand into Canada, as described in-depth by an excellent analysis by Canadian Business. That should have been easy, right? After all, we speak the same language (ignoring the French-speaking Québécois) and most Americans somehow seem think of Canada as our 51st, more polite, colder state to the north.

But it's not that simple. Take two factors as an example. Canada has a different currency. Sure, it uses dollars, but at the time of this writing a Canadian dollar is worth only 72 percent of an American dollar. That conversion rate is constantly fluctuating. Also, Canada uses the metric system. To us in the US, a 2-foot deep shelf is a 2-foot deep shelf. In Canada, that shelf is 60.96 centimeters.

You can already begin to see the IT problem, can't you?

An inventory system that was set up to handle US dollars would need to be updated to handle Canadian dollars. If the system didn't already have a currency field, that would need to be added throughout. Conversion methods would need to be added. And, for an inventory management system that has to fill shelves, knowing the size of product packaging would be important. Software that calculates area for placement would have to be modified to handle multiple measurements and measurement systems.

Add to that issues of sourcing of products and pricing. All the products don't just come from the US. So a box of small widgets in the US might be 12 inches tall. But that same product packaged for the Canadian market might only be 11 1/2 inches tall, or whatever that might translate to in centimeters.

You get the idea. Internationalizing an IT system is a lot of work. For an IT system tracking the amount of data that an enterprise the size of Target needs, you're talking about a lot of development and customization.

It all started with fur

Our story actually goes back to the year 1670. Yes, I'm talking about the 17th century, over 340 years ago.

This is when the Hudson's Bay Company, technically the The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay, was founded under the charter of England's King Charles II. The Hudson's Bay Company was granted a virtual monopoly on fur trading in and around the Great Lakes.

Over the centuries, Hudson's Bay grew and morphed. It operated steamships and funded explorers. It invested in oil and gas operations. The trading posts of the 17th century eventually morphed into the department stores of the 20th century, with Hudson's Bay owning a range of retail outlets.

In 1978, the Zellers department store chain attempted to buy Hudson's Bay, but as it turned out, Hudson's Bay bought Zellers. Zellers did quite well as a discount store chain up through the 1990s, but competition from Walmart began to cost Zellers market share.

By 2010, it became apparent to Zellers' management that the property and leases of the Zellers' stores were worth more than the actual retailing activity itself. So they set out to sell the chain and, in particular, their very valuable leases.

International Management (BUSS 1006)-CW3-Fall-19-QP

BUSS 1006 (QP) Page 4 of 10

This is where our story returns to Target, because in 2011, Target's management, under the leadership of CEO Gregg Steinhafel, paid $1.8 billion for the Zellers leases -- a total of 124 stores. Target now had less than two years to build up a distribution system that could keep 124 stores stocked and selling.

That's two years to hire and train staff, build and stock distribution centers, customize and remodel stores, establish vendor relationships, create demand among a new market of customers, customize or write a vast IT supply chain management system, and populate the databases with records and the physical stores with products.

Everything went terribly, terribly wrong

The company built three brand new, Amazon-warehouse sized distribution centers in Canada. For those who haven't spent time in the supply chain of retail, a distribution center is where all the various products intended for the stores come in from thousands of vendors and get sorted and prepared for shipment to individual stores.

Think of the distribution center as a physical switchboard. Stock isn't supposed to stay in the distribution center. These warehouses must be flowing, dynamic organisms, breathing in products from all over the country and the world and breathing out semi-trucks destined for the individual stores.

But Target Canada couldn't keep track of their products. At first, there was too little coming into the distribution centers. Therefore, store shelves were left bare. Canadian customers who visited these first Targets found ghost towns in the form of large, cavernous stores with barely anything on the shelves. It was like a real-life Fallout 3 Super-Duper Mart.

Later, the distribution centers became overwhelmed. The company managed to order goods, so they came into the distribution centers. But because they couldn't properly compute shelving locations (that conflict between imperial units and the metric system), items backed up so much in the distribution centers that Target Canada management had to offload stock to additional area warehouses.

So they had way too much stock in storage and not enough on the shelves.

As it turns out, Target has a well-oiled supply chain operation and IT system in the US. But because of the programming challenges I alluded to earlier, the company chose not to try modifying that system to support entrance into a new, international market. Instead, they brought in an outside supplier, along with subcontractors and consultants, and tried to build something entirely new.

Here are two examples of where that approach went spectacularly wrong.

The company had to track roughly 75,000 products. Each product required a lot of information. It wasn't just the length, width, and height of each object. You needed the vendor, UPC code, other codes, pricing, weight, costs, and more. Essentially, each product required a couple of pages of field data to be entered in.

And, because the company wasn't extending its existing data entry system, the data being used either had to be exported or entered from scratch. Lengths were entered where widths needed to be. The wrong prices were entered. The wrong descriptions were entered. Low-level marketing assistants were pushed on impossible deadlines to enter thousands upon thousands of fields of information.

International Management (BUSS 1006)-CW3-Fall-19-QP

BUSS 1006 (QP) Page 5 of 10

Is it any wonder that they got 70 percent of it wrong?

Then there was the replenishment system. As you know, stores are designed to sell frequently bought items, for example, Pampers. The idea is that the neighborhood babies will poo, parents will buy Pampers to contain that poo, babies will poo some more, and more Pampers will be bought.

As the Pampers run low on shelves, the replenishment system is supposed to know that, and instruct the distribution centers to send more stock. In Target's case, behind every product's replenishment process was a business analyst, whose job it is to predict just how much pooping the babies of a given region will do.

As you might imagine, each product requires some level of demographic and psychographic analytics in order to build a model for purchase and replenishment for each local store.

But the analysts were compensated (or, more accurately) dinged if too low a percentage of their products was kept in stock at any given time. The replenishment system, by placing automatic orders, would expose when certain products had had an unexpected run, or there were too few in stock. When this happened, the junior analyst would get the equivalent of a demerit put on his or her record.

Not being stupid, the analysts turned off this metric -- because they could. Apparently, the Canadian system made automatic replenishment data an optional switch, so when the analysts started to notice that they were getting criticized for poor stocking levels, they turned off the notification system that would tell people that there were poor stocking levels.

As a result, management reading replenishment reports thought there was plenty of stock, when that was far from the case. Call it product mage don. It wasn't pretty.

All of this, of course, doesn't operate in a vacuum. Canadian customers were not impressed. Sales never took off. And there were more data errors. For example, the "in-DC" date that described the date an object would arrive in the distribution center was interpreted by some as when the object actually arrived, but by others as when it shipped to the distribution center.

The point of all of this is that Target Canada could not get its act together. Plus, other things were going on at Target as well. You might have heard the name of the company's CEO, Gregg Steinhafel, in another context. In December 2013, Target in America experienced a massive breach, which resulted in the exposure of personal data on more than 70 million customers.

Eventually, Target's board had enough and Steinhafel, a 35+ year veteran of Target, was out. Brian Cornell, who had previously been the boss at Sam's Club, was installed as the new Target CEO. Target Canada, which by this time had lost $7 billion, applied for bankruptcy protection. All 133 stores were closed, and 17,000 employees lost their jobs.

So what lessons can be learned? There were so many mistakes, it's hard to find one unifying thread, but it's there if you look hard enough. Put simply, Target should have never added an entirely new and unrelated IT system for Canada. Instead, Target should have carefully extended their existing IT system to support internationalization, and once that capability was available, only then consider expanding into another country.

International Management (BUSS 1006)-CW3-Fall-19-QP

BUSS 1006 (QP) Page 6 of 10

Additionally, the idea of trying to open an entire nation of stores, rather than opening them incrementally, was bound to fail. Scaling everything at once doesn't allow for flaws to be discovered and mediated, but instead leads to cascading failures like the ones that overtook Target Canada's supply chain.

The moral of the story is that IT matters. If done correctly, IT should not be an afterthought. IT drives the entire enterprise. Forgetting that leads to dashed dreams and lost billions.

Task:

1. Write an introduction in which you will briefly highlight the profile of Target and present your

structure. (3 marks for the company’s profile and 2 marks for the structure of the introduction

= 5 marks) 2. Identify and discuss three main strengths (inside and outside the case) that are encouraging

Target to try expanding internationally. (For each characteristic, (6 marks for explanation and 4

marks for discussion) x 3 = 30 marks). 3. Identify and discuss three main reasons (in and outside the case) why Target failed in Canada.

(For each reason, (6 marks for explanation and 4 marks for discussion) x 3 = 30 marks) 4. Do more research, find out and discuss three reasons why Target seems to “play its cards quite

well” in India as compared to Canada. (For each reason, 6 marks for explanation and 4 marks

for discussion = 30 marks)

5. Write a conclusion and highlight your main findings. (5 marks)

Report

Important instructions: 1. For the assignment, you are expected to use different sources of information – primary and

secondary data. 2. The total word count is approximately 1500- maximum 2000 words. 3. The report should contain a title, table of contents, introduction (goal and objectives of report,

main sources used, structure, group work), body (answers to all questions of the assignment),

conclusion (revealing all findings, directly related to objectives, highlighting challenges of group

work), list of references, appendixes.

International Management (BUSS 1006)-CW3-Fall-19-QP

BUSS 1006 (QP) Page 7 of 10

4. Adequate referencing (use CU Harvard style of referencing) should be done in the report. 5. The computer generated report should be in 12, Times New Roman and black and white.

Coloured exhibits should be avoided in the report. 6. Late submissions: Penalty for late submission: 5% of the maximum mark specified for the

assessment will be deducted for each working day.

Plagiarism Policy. As per MEC policy, any form of violation of academic integrity will invite

severe penalty. Plagiarized documents, in part or in whole, submitted by the students will be

subject to this policy.

A. First offence of plagiarism

a. A student will be allowed to re-submit the assignment once, within a maximum period of one

week. However, a penalty of deduction of 25% of the marks obtained for the resubmitted work

will be imposed.

b. Mark deduction: When the work is resubmitted, the marking will be undertaken according to

the marking criteria. In compliance with this policy, the 25% deduction is then made on the

marks obtained. For example, in an assessment that carries a maximum of 50 marks, suppose a

student were to obtain 30 marks for the resubmitted work, the final marks for that assessment

will be 22.5 (after deducting 25% of the marks actually obtained for the resubmitted work).

c. Period of resubmission: The student will have to resubmit the work one week from the date

he or she is advised to resubmit. For example, if the formal advice to resubmit was

communicated to the student on a Sunday (latest by 5 pm), the student will have to resubmit

the work latest by next Sunday 5 pm.

d. If the re-submitted work is also detected to be plagiarized, then the work will be awarded a

zero.

International Management (BUSS 1006)-CW3-Fall-19-QP

BUSS 1006 (QP) Page 8 of 10

e. Resubmission of the work beyond the maximum period of one week will not be accepted and

the work will be awarded a zero.

B. Any further offence of plagiarism

a. If any student is again caught in an act of plagiarism during his/her course of study (either in

the same module, same semester or in any other semester), the student will directly be

awarded zero for the work in which plagiarism is detected. In such cases, the student will not

be allowed to re-submit the work.

C. Guidelines

a. Type 1: In case plagiarism is detected in any component or part submission (submitted at

different times) of one assessment (assignment), the deduction in marks will be applicable for

the whole assessment (assignment), even if only the component or part submission alone

needs to be resubmitted.

b. Type 2: In case plagiarism is detected in a group assessment, all students of the group will be

considered as having committed an act of plagiarism irrespective of whether plagiarism is on

account of the act of all or a few or only one member. The policy will then be applied to all

students.

c. Type 3: Combination of Type 1 and Type 2: In case plagiarism is detected in any component

or part submission (submitted at different times) of a group assessment (assignment), the

deduction in marks will be applicable for the whole assessment (assignment), even if only the

component or part submission alone needs to be resubmitted. All students of the group would

be considered as having committed an act of plagiarism irrespective of whether plagiarism is on

account of the act of all or a few or only one member. The policy will then be applied to all the

students of the group.

International Management (BUSS 1006)-CW3-Fall-19-QP

BUSS 1006 (QP) Page 9 of 10

d. Type 4: Variation of Type 1 and Type 2: In cases where the assessment consists of

components or part submissions that could be a group assessment component (e.g. group

assignment) and an individual assessment component (e.g. individual reflection), the following

will be applicable:

1. If plagiarism is detected in the group assessment component, all students of the group will be

considered as having committed an act of plagiarism, irrespective of whether plagiarism is on

account of the act of all or a few or only one member. The policy will then be applied to all

students of the group. In such cases the group assessment component will be resubmitted as

per the policy.

2. If plagiarism is detected in the individual assessment component, the individual assessment

component will be resubmitted as per the policy. The policy will then be applied to that student

alone.

3. In both cases (a) and/or (b), the deduction in marks will be applicable for the whole

assessment (assignment).

D. Amount of similar material

a. The total amount of similar material in any form of student work from all sources put

together should not exceed 30% (including direct quotations).

b. The total amount of quoted material (direct quotations) in any form of student work from all

sources put together should not exceed 10%.

c. The total amount of similar material in any form of student work from a single source should

not exceed 7 percent. However, cases having a similarity of less than 7 percent in such cases

may still be investigated by the faculty depending on the seriousness of the case.

International Management (BUSS 1006)-CW3-Fall-19-QP

BUSS 1006 (QP) Page 10 of 10

d. If faculty member find enough merit in the case of a student work with a similarity (with a

single source) of more than 7 percent as not a case of plagiarism, the faculty member should

provide detailed comments/remarks to justify the case. (Updated on March 13, 2016)

UoW Grading Policy

Grade Mark Grade Point

A >=71 4.00

A- 67-70 3.75

B+ 64-66 3.50

B 61-63 3.25

B- 57-60 3.00

C+ 54-56 2.75

C 50-53 2.50

C- 48-49 2.25

D+ 43-47 2.00

D 40-42 1.50

F <40 0