[SOLVED] 1-3 Journal: Company Selection and Rationale

The final project for this course asks you to apply all of the operations concepts that you have learned about to an actual company or organization. This will involve evaluating a company’s current operations and conducting analyses using established evaluation tools to offer recommendations that will increase profits, lower costs, promote differentiation and competitiveness, and improve supply chain activities while leveraging technology and lean processes to implement long-range goals.

Prompt: Once you have reviewed the Final Project Guidelines and Rubric document, select a company or organization that meets the following criteria:

• Must be from the manufacturing, service, IT, or healthcare industries (other industries could be used with instructor approval)
• Must be large enough to have multiple product/service lines to consider
• Must be in a market that is highly competitive where production costs are always a key concern
• Must have potential for and a vision of global expansion

See this list of companies to help guide your selection.

Note: In the absence of a suitable real company, you may use a notional or conceptual company for this assignment as long as it meets the above criteria. In either case, to avoid any proprietary data issues, the performance data for this assignment should not be real data; however, real data could be used if it is publicly available.

Related: leveraging

In your journal assignment, identify the company or organization you have selected to research for your final project. Be sure to clearly and adequately address the following:

• Justify how this company or organization satisfies each of the four criteria listed above.
• Explain how the 10 operations management critical decision areas can be applied to this company or organization.
• Outline your initial thoughts on how the final project topics will apply to your selected company or organization.

Once your journal assignment is submitted, you will receive instructor feedback and approval of your selected company. Note that formal approval of your company is necessary before beginning work on the first milestone assignment for the final project.