Aramco case- Operations Management paper
after having completed the 5 assignments in class, you have mostly all the required materials at hand to compose your term paper. It will only need restructuring, formatting, paraphrasing and filling in the gaps from the assignments.
There is no one or fixed format for writing a paper. Please feel free to use the following or a modification of it as your guideline:
Include any /several of the following:
o Typically, a term – paper focuses on a single or few related problem/s. It is not merely an informative write – up about the company but one that researches a problem in some detail.
o A cover page indicating the title of you paper, your name, course name and ID, instructor
o A summary (or Executive Summary) which briefly describes what your study is about, why you got interested on the topic/subject – area /company, where you obtained your data/information from and what tools and frameworks of analysis you used to conduct your study. Usually this section is best contained in 1 page.
o Acknowledgements
o Table of contents
o I introductory chapter /section including the opening of your paper, introduction to your company, company background information (establishment, product/s, country of origin, country\ies of operations, mode of doing international business, size of company, revenues, profitability, brief history, etc.), what the study is about, what problem areas you focus on, what tools/frameworks you have used, how you obtained the data/information you used
o You might also want to include the vision and mission of your company
o Also, in the introductory chapter it is best to state your home and host countries. For example, if your company originate in the USA – the US will be your home country. Then if you are looking into the company’s operations in say China, then China will be treated as your host country.
o Appropriately, divide your paper into 2 – sections for the home and host countries
o Description of the operating environment – the cultural, political, government, economic, geographic environments.
o Description of the company’ s competitive environment – use SWOT, five – forces, Michael Porter’s Diamond – any or several models that are appropriate for your paper. Remember to include market information – market leader, market follower, major events going on in the market or any other information relevant to the competitive environment.
o Description of company strategy – remember, this must be in line with the operating and competitive environments. For instance, if the competition on is very intense, the company might be focusing on intense e marketing strategies or perhaps niche marketing to avoid the competition. The strategy might include current and future plans as well. You might want to include some of the company’s unique practices in HR, accounting, marketing or financing if you see it fit.
o Identification and brief description of the company’s current challenges or severe problems it is facing. Please make several suggestions to resolves those issues. Remember – you are advising the top management of the corporation, so your suggestions will focus on the problem keeping in view the background of the company’s strategies and the existing operating and competitive environments. You might suggest any minor or even radical changes as long as they are logical and fit into the existing conditions – if you can justify your reasons – you are good.
o Most of the times doing an analysis of the company’s value chain could be very useful which reveals many details about the company’s operations and supporting functions and help us understand underlying operational (configuration and coordination) issues.
o If you use any other framework or analytic model, please discuss those findings as well
o You can also write about the future plans of the company, its products, innovative practices, future direction of business, what factors are like to be at play in the future
o Any future projections and the rationale for the same or future projects might also constitute useful information
o If you have tables and charts that you used to do you analysis, please include those at the back as a part of your annexes which do not count towards your 30 pages. Number your tables and charts appropriately so that we can relate them to the relevant sections in the paper. Should a chart or table be very important for the main body of y our paper, you can also include it in the body but that will take some of your valuable and limited space
o Include anything else that is relevant to your organization or paper
o Have a section for bibliography and references – at least 15. Use APA format for making the references
Write up excluding the cover page, table of contents, summary, charts/tables and bibliography will be about 30 pages. It is not a problem if you are a few pages under or a few pages over.
Grading
The paper will be graded based on the following:
Visual and content presentation
Flow – logical flow of entire write – up and cohesion among chapters/sections
Completeness (sections, information, analysis, format)
Analysis or presentation of available data
Problem identification and recommendations provided
