Business studies a level ocr june 2012 case study

Any ideas what topics are likely to come up on this All About the Baby case study?

There will be one question on each of the 4 sections (human resources, production, finance and marketing)

The ways in which AAB could change the organisational structure in order to improve efficiency. This will mainly involve talking about changes to the structure and touching on the motivation theories. Don’t talk about delayering though as this would not help AAB reduce costs as they want to expand although you could talk about how delayering is inefficient for AAB’s structure. Perhaps AAB could change to a more decentralised structure which would enable employees to be delegated more meaningful tasks and to be involved in the decision making process this would enhance motivation greatly as suggested by Herzberg and Mayo and so employees will take more pride in their work which could mean that fewer mistakes are made thus resulting in AAB becoming a more efficient business in the future. Could AAB decentralise by product? This could mean that employees will be able to identify local customer needs and trends in terms of these regions which could in turn mean that AAB is able to make more informed decisions on the marketing mix of their products as they will know what customers want. On the other hand this decentralised approach may cause duplication of resources to arise and this would result in higher wastage and therefore it is essential that AAB’s employees are monitored within this structure however not as much as the current structure otherwise employees will not experience responsibility much will demotivate the workforce

How AAB could use the Boston Matrix and product lifecycle in order to help AAB decide the best marketing mix's for it's products and what they should do to the products in order to improve demand and revenue generated from products. Healthy sleep may cause the supreme mattress and other mattresses to fall into a declining market as this mattress is better quality and much cheaper and so meaning that in the future AAB may have very few products in their product portfolio. Could talk about how this will be their USP and could help them to dominate this segment of the market in the future as there will be so much interest as other firm will not be able to produce a product to this standard. Keep talking about cows dogs, rising stars and problem children and you will be fine for this question for example the Ultimate mattress clearly has low market share and growth and therefore is a dog. This product is also in the decline phase of the Product life cycle and so it is too late to implement extension strategies. Perhaps AAB should consider withdrawing this product from the market as the capital invested into this product would outweigh the revenue generated and therefore AAB should remove the Ultimate from it’s product portfolio in order to concentrate on other products in the long term future which could potentially help AAB focus their marketing efforts on more profitable products for example the pocket sprung mattress which is a star and thus a cash cow of the future…

How AAB could improve overall efficiency which could include: Reducing number of suppliers, Renting a depot overseas to break bulk out of Britain to ensure that products don't have to travel all the way from overseas to British ports only to be repackaged and shipped back to countries near suppliers in the far east, introducing CAD in the designs team to reduce the time it takes to create designs and also put them into production as designs could be sent by email to subcontractors thus giving them a competitive edge. Could also talk about TRAINING EMPLOYEES as they don’t know how to use these new systems which may be causing incomplete orders as they don’t know how to set the correct reorder level. Or the incomplete orders could be due to the inexperienced staff at Gatwick repackaging the products incorrectly.

The final one is going to be on finance. Perhaps something to do with what stakeholders can learn from the company's accounts and if the accounts will 'set the minds of the firms key stakeholders.' I was thinking we could have something on how AAB could use the breakeven analysis to help them in the decision making process. It is clear that distribution is the one of the main issues to AAB's loss as have £28 million worth of stock compared to last year’s £23 million. They need to try and get the stock to the retail stores and franchise stores as customers are not able to purchase them.