5. The confidentiality agreement did limit the scope of the audit performed on ZZZZ Best. It is the job of the auditor to obtain sufficient and appropriate evidence. When Ernst & Whinney were not allowed to follow-up with anyone involved in the restoration process that limited their ability to gather evidence. The company should have been able to follow up with all venders and customers to attest to the validity of the financial statements and they were not able to do this and not able to gather the “appropriate and sufficient evidence” needed.
It may involve the use of questionnaires, interviews with customers, experiments, and many other approaches (Perreault, Cannon, & McCarthy, 2009, p. 202).” Kudler Fine Foods must perform quality marketing research if they hope to remain successful with their current stores given the local competition from other stores in the area. Market research also includes the process of systematically gathering, recording and analyzing data and information about clients, rivals and the market. Its uses include helping create long term business plans, launching new products or services, fine tuning existing products and services, and expanding into new markets. Market research can be used to determine which additional areas of research are needed for Kudler in the areas of customer satisfaction, and a need based analysis to determine if expansion of a new store is necessary or continued growth and development of existing locations. The customer service satisfaction survey that is currently in place on the Kudler website will help to identify what the customer’s like and don’t like about a minimum number of variables but market research needs to also include other vital information like culture, socio-economic background, health, and other marketing mix elements.
| COMPANY DECISION-MAKING How teams make decisions is nearly as important as the results of the decisions a team makes; this assignment asks teams to consider how they are going through the decision making process – including identifying what works, what doesn’t, and what tools/information the team is using. 1. Provide an example of the typical way your NewShoes Company goes through the decision-making process. | For example, when realized our product’s net loss in the market we | |identified that the problem was in the cost of our shoes. We then did | |market research to develop alternatives and eventually decide on a | |more profitable price.
Nordstrom does not offer extensive training programs to its customers. Employees are paid on a commission basis, they are surrounded by a very competitive environment and it is ingrained in them that customer satisfaction is key. Employees needing to train new employees may not emphasize to the new employee why the need for customer satisfaction is so important. Also, because of the competitive environment, it may cause the employee to not train the new employee appropriately because of threat to their sales, which could in turn cause a misconception of their family environment. There is no training program for them that state any reasons why the culture of the company relies on customer satisfaction.
There is an emphasis on factual and numerical reporting on which we make decisions about how our company will be run. This is a seriously flawed method of management in that there is a complete lack of thought to the psychological impact of their decisions and management of the organization. The lack of empathy is palatable in the room during these meetings. My failure to elicit empathy for others and myself in the group creates a huge challenge for me. In order to more effectively contribute to the organization, I would like to spend some time researching techniques to connect on an emotional level with the team.
Tesco have multiple business unit to sell such as fresh food, groceries, household stuffs, mobile phone, Tesco bank, etc and in this case, the parent company (which is Tesco’s board) should be able to explore and discover each of business unit resources and capability and make a good coordination with each of them so that the synergies between the parent company and business unit will be created. Creating synergy is not easy, the firm should know to add value by influencing them. Synergy is “value” that comes up due to the good coordination and relationship between parent division and sub division. | People (People Test) | A good design can be taken place if a firm has the right people in the right place. No matter how good the design look in the paper, if a firm does not have the right people, it never works.
Explain how different market research methods have been used to make a marketing decision within a selected situation or business Market research is the process of gathering information about your businesses industry, customers and competition in order assess the feasibility of your business idea. Prior to starting your research it is important to determine your objective and to clearly define your research questions. Many entrepreneurs avoid doing market research out of fear they will not find what they want to find or because it can be costly / time consuming. However, making decisions without first doing some research can be risky. Primary research (or field research) gathers original information directly for your purpose, rather than being gathered from published sources.
In our opinion this problem has two main root causes. The first one is that managers do not want to upset employees and the sense of teamwork and egalitarianism, so they give medium ratings to everyone. They might believe that a medium grading does not affect neither positively nor negatively employees’ performance. We believe that the other cause could be the lack of clarity in the rating levels description. The fact that the grading system is not clear for managers hampers a precise evaluation of all employees.
At first glance, both Francois and the sales staff are not working in harmony or synchronized together. Indeed, leadership is a relationship based on mutual exchange between leaders and followers (Iszatt-White & Saunders, 2014:107). Knowing that the new manager lacks in product knowledge of IT industry and managerial experience, the team are sceptical about his arrival and they don’t necessarily look up to him at first. He still manages to learn quickly the product range and manufacturing processes but his acceptance among is still unproven. Thus, by applying Hogg’s social identity theory, we see from the follower’s perspective why they have a hard time with Francois.
In the academic literature there are two famous culture-related M&A problems - “liability of foreignness” formulated by Zaheer in his paper of 1995 and “double-layered acculturation” suggested in 1996 paper by Barkema et al. The main idea behind these papers is that companies who follow an M&A deal may meet significant obstacles in the form of differences in business practices, legal systems, languages and customs at double levels, introducing new liabilities, which ultimately may prevent a company from realizing its strategic objectives. Additionally, asymmetry of information that a company may encounter in foreign markets may make it difficult to study a new market in the correct way. Depending on the degree of required integration, there could arise other principal issues such as conflicts originated from cultural stereotypes, nationalism and even racism (Stahl and Voigt, 2005). Therefore, the rapid increase in cross-boarder M&A transactions is accompanied by growing popularity of cultural due diligence and greater interest to the “cultural distance” hypothesis.