Value Chain free essay sample

QUESTION 1: Identify factors in the Microenvironment (PESTEL) which are relevant to SABMILLER. ANSWER: SABMiller’s activities are heavily influenced by the political, social and legislative environmental factors within which it operates; meaning this has made the company proactive when dealing with macro factors. SABMILLER operates in developing as well as matured markets. These markets include very challenging aspects which in the past has limited the threat of new entrants. These markets includes very tough competition; as rivalry in the Brewing industry is increasingly high. SABMILLER tend to own multiple brands with different market positions. In this market, it is much easier for competitors to launch rival products that compete directly on price and thus eroding market share. After analyzing the company’s competition, SABMiller has and still is experiencing this problem; for example in North America; especially recently where InBev has bought Anhevser-Busch; this has helped the dominant Brewer to enlarge a further space between themselves and SABMiller; which has affected the company’s market share future plans deeply, SABMiller now has to come up with new innovative ideas to try and close the gap between them and A-B InBev. We will write a custom essay sample on Value Chain or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page The American Industry is the largest brewing market by value as rivalry is now more intense than ever, meaning more competitors, are entering into a price war with SABMiller. This has become a huge threat for SABMiller, but it does also hold opportunities to weaken this threat down. For example the company has the opportunity to acquire more stakes in the Brazilian market, or become the owner of China resources which is the largest brewer in China. SAB’s acquisition of Miller was largely due to the pressure from the London Stock Exchange. It is felt that SAB was at risk due to its over reliance of soft currencies in certain market. Even though their core competences were elsewhere, SAB went on with the takeover to please the stakeholders. SABMiller’s South African Culture has shaped the strategic development of the company. It is this culture, which makes their distinct capability of entering emerging markets less imitable. As highlighted in the case study, SABMiller strategy represents a synthesis of learning based on the historical developments of the company. In conclusion, in order to identify the company’s position. It is important to carry out its business external analysis. If is also essential to identify its core competences and capabilities as well as stakeholder expectations in order to successfully identify the company’s strategic position. QUESTION 2: Which force in the external environment is exerting grater pressure? How should the organization react? ANSWER: The forces in the external environment is exerting greater pressure is the emergence of competitors in its prime markets. In future, SABMiller will have to face tough competition from its rival. How should the organization react? a) SABMiller has to come up with new innovative ideas to try and close the gap between them and the competitors. b) SABMiller had to make some strategic choices to please its key players. c) SABMiller to acquired local brewing business to enable them to grow and overcome certain business restriction through acquisition. d) By adding quality and consistency to the beer. e) By bringing its own operating practices and management skills. f) By  introducing brand management and its brand portfolio.

Portable Art From Upper Paleolithic Period

Portable Art From Upper Paleolithic Period Portable art (known as mobiliary art or art mobilier in French) typically refers to objects carved during the European Upper Paleolithic period (40,000-20,000 years ago) that can be moved or carried as personal objects. The oldest example of portable art, however, is from Africa nearly 100,000 years older than anything in Europe. Further, ancient art is found around the globe far from Europe: the category has had to expand to serve the data that have been collected. Categories of Paleolithic Art Traditionally, Upper Paleolithic art is divided into two broad categoriesparietal (or cave) art, including the paintings at Lascaux, Chauvet, and Nawarla Gabarnmang; and mobiliary (or portable art), meaning art that can be carried, such as the famous Venus figurines. Portable art consists of objects carved from stone, bone, or antler, and they take a wide variety of forms. Small, three-dimensional sculpted objects such as the widely known Venus figurines, carved animal bone tools, and two-dimensional relief carvings or plaques are all forms of portable art. Figurative and Non-Figurative Two classes of portable art are recognized today: figurative and non-figurative. Figurative portable art includes three-dimensional animal and human sculptures, but also figures carved, engraved, or painted on stones, ivory, bones, reindeer antlers, and other media. Non-figurative art includes abstract drawings carved, incised, pecked or painted in patterns of grids, parallel lines, dots, zigzag lines, curves, and filigrees. Portable art objects are made by a wide variety of methods, including grooving, hammering, incising, pecking, scraping, polishing, painting, and staining. Evidence of these ancient art forms can be quite subtle, and one reason for the broadening of the category well beyond Europe is that with the advent of optical and scanning electron microscopy, many more examples of art have been discovered. Oldest Portable Art The oldest portable art discovered to date is from South Africa and made 134,000 years ago, consisting of a piece of scored ochre at Pinnacle Point Cave. Other pieces of ochre with engraved designs include one from Klasies River cave 1 at 100,000 years ago, and Blombos cave, where engraved designs on 17 pieces of ochre were retrieved, the oldest dated to 100,000-72,000 years ago. Ostrich eggshell was first known to have been used as a medium for engraved portable art in southern Africa at Diepkloof Rockshelter and Klipdrift Shelter in South Africa and Apollo 11 cave in Namibia between 85-52,000. The earliest figurative portable art in South Africa is from the Apollo 11 cave, where seven portable stone (schist) plaques were recovered, made approximately 30,000 years ago. These plaques include drawings of rhinoceros, zebras, and humans, and possibly human-animal beings (called therianthropes). These images are painted with brown, white, black and red pigments made of a wide variety of substances, including red ochre, carbon, white clay, black manganese, white ostrich eggshell, hematite, and gypsum. Oldest in Eurasia The oldest figurines in Eurasia are ivory figurines dated to the Aurignacian period between 35,000-30,000 years ago in the Lone and Ach valleys in Swabian alps. Excavations at the Vogelherd Cave recovered several small ivory figurines of several animals; Geissenklà ¶sterle cave contained more than 40 pieces of ivory. Ivory figurines are widespread in the Upper Paleolithic, extending well into central Eurasia and Siberia. The earliest portable art object recognized by archaeologists was the Neschers antler, a 12,500-year-old reindeer antler with a stylized partial figure of a horse carved in the surface in left profile. This object was found at Neschers, an open-air Magdalenian settlement in Auvergne region of France and recently discovered within the British Museum collections. It was likely part of the archaeological materials excavated from the site between 1830 and 1848. Why Portable Art? Why our ancient ancestors made portable art so very long ago is unknown and realistically unknowable. However, there are plenty of possibilities that are interesting to contemplate. During the mid-twentieth century, archaeologists and art historians explicitly connected portable art to shamanism. Scholars compared the use of portable art by modern and historical groups and recognized that portable art, specifically figural sculpture, was often related to folklore and religious practices. In ethnographic terms, portable art objects could be considered amulets or totems: for a while, even terms like rock art were dropped from the literature, because it was considered dismissive of the spiritual component that was attributed to the objects. In a fascinating set of studies beginning in the late 1990s, David Lewis-Williams made the explicit connection between ancient art and shamanism when he suggested that abstract elements on rock art are similar to those images seen by people in visions during altered states of consciousness. Other Interpretations A spiritual element may well have been involved with some portable art objects, but wider possibilities have since been put forward by archaeologists and art historians, such as portable art as personal ornamentation, toys for children, teaching tools, or objects expressing personal, ethnic, social, and cultural identity. For example, in an attempt to look for cultural patterns and regional similarities, Rivero and Sauvet looked at a large set of representations of horses on portable art made from bone, antler, and stone during the Magdalenian period in northern Spain and southern France. Their research revealed a handful of traits that seem to be particular to regional groups, including the use of double manes and prominent crests, traits that persist through time and space. Recent Studies Other recent studies include that of Danae Fiore, who studied the rate of decoration used on bone harpoon heads and other artifacts from Tierra del Fuego, during three periods dated between 6400-100 BP. She found that the decoration of harpoon heads increased when sea mammals (pinnipeds) were a key prey for the people; and decreased when there was an increase in consumption of other resources (fish, birds, guanacos). Harpoon design during this time was widely variable, which Fiore suggests were created through a free cultural context or fostered through a social requirement of individual expression. Lemke and colleagues reported more than 100 incised stones at the Clovis-Early Archaic layers of the Gault site in Texas, dated 13,000-9,000 cal BP. They are among the earliest art objects from a secure context in North America. The nonfigurative decorations include geometric parallel and perpendicular lines inscribed on limestone tablets, chert flakes, and cobbles. Sources Abadà ­a, Oscar Moro. Paleolithic Art: A Cultural History. Journal of Archaeological Research, Manuel R. Gonzlez Morales, Volume 21, Issue 3, SpringerLink, January 24, 2013. Bello SM, Delbarre G, Parfitt SA, Currant AP, Kruszynski R, and Stringer CB. Lost and found: the remarkable curatorial history of one of the earliest discoveries of Palaeolithic portable art. Antiquity 87(335):237-244. Farbstein R. The Significance of Social Gestures and Technologies of Embellishment in Paleolithic Portable Art. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 18(2):125-146. Fiore D. Art in time. Diachronic rates of change in the decoration of bone artifacts from the Beagle Channel region (Tierra del Fuego, Southern South America). Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 30(4):484-501. Lemke AK, Wernecke DC, and Collins MB. Early Art in North America: Clovis and Later Paleoindian Incised Artifacts from the Gault Site, Texas (41bl323). American Antiquity 80(1):113-133. Lewis-Williams JD. Agency, art, and altered consciousness: A motif in French (Quercy) Upper Paleolithic parietal art. Antiquity 71:810-830. Moro Abadà ­a O, and Gonzlez Morales MR. Towards a genealogy of the concept of paleolithic mobiliary art. Journal of Anthropological Research 60(3):321-339. Rifkin RF, Prinsloo LC, Dayet L, Haaland MM, Henshilwood CS, Diz EL, Moyo S, Vogelsang R, and Kambombo F. Characterising pigments on 30 000-year-old portable art from Apollo 11 Cave, Karas Region, southern Namibia. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 5:336-347. Rivero O, and Sauvet G. Defining Magdalenian cultural groups in Franco-Cantabria by the formal analysis of portable artworks. Antiquity 88(339):64-80. Roldn Garcà ­a C, Villaverde Bonilla V, Rà ³denas Marà ­n I, and Murcia Mascarà ³s S. A Unique Collection of Palaeolithic Painted Portable Art: Characterization of Red and Yellow Pigments from the Parpallà ³ Cave (Spain). PLOS ONE 11(10):e0163565. Volkova YS. Upper Paleolithic Portable Art in Light of Ethnographic Studies. Archaeology, Ethnology, and Anthropology of Eurasia 40(3):31-37.

Electronic Monitoring and Employee Productivity Assignment

Electronic Monitoring and Employee Productivity - Assignment Example Most employees are subjected to monitoring that includes office and cubicle searches, video surveillance, electronic mail monitoring and health and psychological screening (Schumacher, 2011, pp 138-144). The current trends in electronic monitoring especially in the 21st century have increased at an alarming rate. The latest monitoring trends include the use of video cameras, email monitoring and telephone recordings among others. The monitoring has moved to network forensic monitoring software that is currently in use to mine emails for keywords and security breaches (Schumacher, 2011, pp 138-144). Most managers say that without monitoring employee activities it is difficult to achieve productivity especially in this era of social networking. The rise of the internet compounded by the development of the smart phones have made it difficult for employees to stick to work and therefore contributing to decreased productivity. This may not be true considering some of the theories that hav e been propagated about employees and productivity (Schumacher, 2011, pp 138-144). McGregor’s theory X and Y help us understand the positive and the negative aspects of employing electronic monitoring at the workplace.... Tailor says that employees should do what managers tell them to do and the managers tell the employees what to do in order to be paid accordingly. This theory has been used to support electronic monitoring so as to achieve productivity and pay employees what they are entitled to depending on what they have done (Bolden, Gosling, A, & Dennison, 2003, pp 6-50). Therefore employee monitoring can be seen as both positive and negative in many aspects. Implementing the electronic surveillance will mean that employees are under tight control from the management and therefore they may end up being less productivity as McGregor puts it. On the other hand the productivity might increase because when they are monitored, the time they are not productive is subtracted from the total time. This means that by the end of the day their wages will be reduced. The reduction will make them leave the activities that make them less productive so as to increase their wages (Schumacher, 2011, pp 138-144). E mployee monitoring has been criticized by a number of people because it infringes on the rights of both the customer and the employee. It is not the best form of management as it increases stress, decreases job satisfaction, cultivates a culture of mistrust and negative work relationships and therefore it is not. To some level there are key ethical considerations that encourage employee electronic monitoring and these include security as concerns a company’s information such as trade secrets or restricted places, productivity as in employees have to be at the right place at the right time and doing the right things at the right time, reputation as employers do not want company information such as logos to be found at the wrong place that may cause them