Students' zone - Learning Assignments

<< back to chapter listing

Chapter 9 Global operations

(1) Compare Singapore and Malaysia as a possible location for: (i) a PC assembly plant, (ii) a wafer
factory, (iii) a regional maintenance centre, (iv) a customer training centre for international customers,
(v) a chemical processing plant.
(2) According to Ferdows (1997), what are the differences between a ‘contributor’ factory and an ‘outpost’
factory?
(3) What are the new roles that De Meyer and Vereecke (1994) assign to ‘foreign’ factories?
(4) What differentiates global manufacturing of goods from global production of services?
(5) What is a vertical electronic marketplace?
(6) Surf the Internet and find: one horizontal e-procurement site, one vertical e-procurement site and
one exchange (different from the examples given in the text).
(7) What are the three major functions of global logistics?
(8) For the point of view of an infrastructure client, compare the relative advantages and disadvantages
of turnkey projects, direct project management and BOT.
(9) What is the ‘hostage’ problem in BOT contracts?
(10) Based on your personal experience on surfing the Web, give concrete examples of its reach and
richness capabilities.
(11) Go to the Dell web site in the country where you are located and try to configure your laptop with a
keyboard that is not used in your country (for instance, a French keyboard if you are in the United
States). What do you observe? What conclusions can you draw about the Internet as a global tool?
(12) Why do you think business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions are less likely to develop on the Internet,
both domestically and globally?