Global Supply Chain Management / Operations Management
2,494 words
Global Supply Chain and Operations Performance: Company Case Analysis
This Level 7 individual assignment requires students to produce a 2,500-word company case analysis examining an important operations performance issue within a real organisation. Students may select an organisation of any size, type, industry or country and must concentrate their analysis on one operations performance objective: cost, dependability, flexibility, speed or quality. The report requires students to identify the current challenges faced by the chosen organisation in relation to the selected performance objective and critically examine those challenges using relevant operations and supply chain management theories, concepts and analytical tools. Rather than providing only a descriptive account of organisational activities, students are expected to apply appropriate theoretical frameworks to the case and evaluate how these concepts could contribute to improved organisational and supply chain performance. A significant component of the assignment involves critically discussing appropriate best practices for performance improvement. These may include digital technologies, sustainability practices or other relevant operational and supply chain approaches. Students should connect these practices directly to findings from their chosen company case and assess their practical relevance, opportunities and limitations. Academic literature and appropriate real-world evidence should be used throughout to substantiate the analysis and recommendations. The assignment evaluates students' ability to analyse supply chain and operations problems, apply academic theory to organisational practice, and develop evidence-based conclusions and practical recommendations. The marking rubric places substantial emphasis on analysis and discussion (30%), application of theory (30%), and conclusions and recommendations (30%), with the remaining 10% allocated to presentation, logical structure, English expression and correct referencing. The report must use Harvard referencing, include a contents page, and follow the specified academic formatting requirements, including Arial size 12, 1.5 line spacing and A4 pages with 2.54 cm margins.
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Operations and Supply Chain Management
1,800 words
Strategic Sourcing and Supply Chain Resilience Under Global Uncertainty — A Firm-Level Critical Evaluation
This type of postgraduate coursework asks students to take a single real firm — a British company, or a multinational with substantial UK operations — and critically evaluate how its sourcing and supply chain strategy has adapted to a decade of sustained disruption: the pandemic, geopolitical conflict, tariff volatility, and departure from the European single market. The analytical scope is broad but the depth expectation is narrow. Students choose one or two themes rather than surveying all of them: insourcing versus outsourcing and location decisions; single versus multi-sourcing across supplier segments or regions; how supplier selection and monitoring criteria have shifted toward reliability and geographic proximity; alignment between sourcing decisions and wider corporate objectives; supplier and customer relationship management under cross-border friction; inventory tactics such as stockpiling and safety stock repositioning; digital adoption for visibility and compliance; sustainable sourcing under cost pressure; or risk management around currency, customs and compliance. The evidence base is deliberately mixed. Alongside academic literature, students are expected to draw on annual reports, shareholder briefings, company statements, practitioner journals and recent news coverage — with a minimum spread of credible sources across both categories, and some of the non-academic material drawn from the most recent year so the analysis reflects current firm behaviour rather than historical commentary. At least one theoretical framework from the module or the wider literature must be applied to the firm's decisions, and at least one recent documented practice must be examined with specific sourcing. Two requirements distinguish strong submissions. The first is criticality: the brief explicitly separates evaluation from description, and marks weight critical analysis most heavily. Reporting what a firm did is not the task; assessing whether it was the right response, and what opportunities and risks it created, is. The second is the recommendation — at least one specific, actionable proposal with steps, anticipated obstacles, expected outcomes, and a clear line back to the firm's own stated goals. A generic suggestion to "diversify suppliers" fails this test; a costed, sequenced proposal grounded in the firm's actual constraints does not. Word-count conventions are stricter than students often expect: in-text references, tables, illustrations and front matter typically count, while appendices and the reference list do not. Our support on assessments of this type is guidance-based. Typical areas of help include: narrowing a firm and theme so the analysis fits the word limit, explaining the difference between description and critical evaluation with worked examples, clarifying how a theoretical framework should structure an argument rather than sit decoratively in a paragraph, checking source mix and Harvard referencing consistency, and reviewing a completed draft against the published assessment weightings.
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