WALMART Supply Chain Management
Organisation Topic
• Walmart • Suppliers relationship
• Supply chain sustainability
Provide a critical analysis of the chosen organization’s purchasing and SCM activities with reference to the two topics, that makes clear the key strategic decisions the organisation has made and their effect on its success or failure.
Structure of assignment
A suggested structure is as follows:
• Short summary
• Introduction – introduce the company, and the topics you will focus on
• Literature review – identify key journal articles on your topics, review them to identify themes that you want to include in your analysis. Include any models, frameworks or figures that will help your analysis ensuring that you reference them. If you design a model yourself, add the caption and (Source: Author) or if you adapt a model, add the caption and (Source: adapted from e.g. Walker et al, 2014)
• Analysis – Conduct searches of company websites, newspaper articles, annual reports, and cases on the organisation that you have chosen. Conduct an analysis of the company, using the themes and models identified in your literature review
• Recommendations – drawing on your analysis, write what you would recommend about the future of purchasing and SCM at the organisation.
• References – include all sources
Tips
• Unfortunately your search is unlikely to find academic articles on your specific topics and the company (e.g. Risk in SCM at walmart), so you would do better searching for general articles on your topics via EBSCO / Web of Knowledge. There also useful articles listed at the end of lecture slides, and some articles are on learning central
• Get articles from journals on topics from journals such as JOM, IJOPM, SCM:IJ, JPSM, JSCM
• Do not just rely on the lecture slides and suggested references. You will do better if you show evidence of broader reading of references
• Depending on the company information and articles you gather, you may choose what topics to focus on (e.g. if you find a lot of newspaper articles on the topic ‘Risk’ at Company X, you may choose to focus on that).
• Do a critical analysis of purchasing and SCM, not just a description of a company or companies
• Be creative! i.e. in combining two topics, in your use of tables and figures, etc.