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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