Logistics and Project Planning Essay Example for Free

Logistics and Project Planning Essay The mission of elc was to provide consumers with access to the Internet at the lowest cost. Despite the excellent support and recognition from the public, elc was experiencing adversity of keeping their business profitable after the Internet Investment bubble burst. The original concept of owning many of the large stand-alone cafes with 250-500 PC terminals at each cafe was not working well. elc undertook a dramatic restructuring of the company by downsizing the cafes. Many of the large, original stand-alone elc stores will be run by franchisees. These franchised stores will become smaller stores which have 20 to 30 PCs terminals at each cafe and with no staff required except for regular maintenance. Less involvement with store operations allows elc to concentrate on activities of their core competence and outsource all the non-core activities. Their core competence was to continue building their ‘easy’ brand and applying the yield management model to the Internet cafe business. Their business goal was to open 4 new franchises per week over the next 3 years. In order to achieve the goal of growing their franchised Internet cafes business, an efficient, flexible and cost-effective logistics system is what they need for the provision of equipment to the franchisee. Since logistics is one of the non-core activities that is perceived as a bottleneck for scalability, the present logistics system of elc will be reviewed and findings of whether to outsource the logistics system will be presented to the management team. Background of easyGroup Stelios Haji-loannou, the founder of easyGroup, is the renowned Greek entrepreneur who utilized his family money to launch a serial of ventures. His first venture, Stelmar Tankers was found in 1992. The company very soon went into the public sector and was listed on New York Stock Exchange. In 1995, he found easyJet. easyJet was a no-frills, low cost airline company and later grew to become the largest no-frill airline in Europe and was listed on the London stock exchange in 2000. Building on the success of easyJet and to extend the ‘easy’ brand further, he formed the holding company easyGroup in 1998. easyInternetcafe was his first venture under the umbrella of the easyGroup. Other companies in the group included easyJet, easyCar, easyCinema, easy. com, easyMoney and easyValue, easyBus, easyPizza, easyCruise, and easyDorm. Low price and no-frill is the key elements of the ‘easy’ brand. Yield Management Model Stelios is an enthusiast of Yield Management Model and he applies the model to his business. According to Wikipedia, yield management is the process of understanding, anticipating and influencing consumer behavior in order to maximize revenue or profits from a fixed, perishable resource (such as airline seats or hotel room reservations). Stelios believes that lowering the price will increase the demands of the customers significantly. By locating all the large internet cafes in high traffic areas, elc aimed to capture the maximum revenue by providing internet services with a variety of price points at different points in time (peak hours or off peak hours). The price for Internet access varies based on demand, raising the price in dollar per hour in mid-afternoon, when stores are nearly full. That gives bargain hunters an incentive to visit in the non-peak hours, when price is dropping. The model is well suited for business with high fixed cost and perishable supply. The large numbers of computer equipments inside the Internet cafes are capital intensive for elc. The empty seats inside the cafe in a certain time period cannot generate any revenue and thus can be said to have perished. elc uses one of their capital proprietary products, CVM, to monitor how seats are occupied and react accordingly, for example by adjusting the price to offer discounts when it appears that large amount of seats are remaining empty. However, this model is not working for elc as it does for airline and hotel industries. The customers’ willingness to pay for using the internet access at theses internet cafe is impulsive and their demands are not easy to predict. The yield management model works well for airlines and hotels mainly because their customers usually plan ahead of time on their journey. Therefore, airlines and hotels are more likely to predict their customer demands and adjust the prices accordingly. They still have time to attract customers by offering last minute deals. But for internet cafes, customers do not make reservation for their usage of Internet in advance. Customer demands are thus very hard to predict. Even though the CVM can adjust the pricing based on the vacancy of the cafe, it is difficult to attract enough customers in a short period of time to fill up the empty usage of the internet access. Since Internet was still a new technology at that time, Internet access was not yet considered to be an essential product. Customers were likely to learn when to visit the cafes so that they can pay less compared to other time period.

Aviation Weather Delays :: essays research papers

Weather Delays. We seem to have heard so much more about them in recent years. Is the weather getting worse? Are the newer planes less able to stand the rough weather than the planes of the past? Maybe travelers just complain more What is the reason for the 70% increase in flight delays and 23% increase in cancellations blamed on the weather since 1978? Are the airlines just using weather as a catch all to cover other problems and keep themselves covered under the statemeant †you cant control the weather†. I will attempt to answer these questions along with a few others in this report but, the question that cannot be escaped from beginning to the end seems to be Is the weathe rreally that bad?† Let’s start with why have the flight delays increased so much since 1978.It all seemed like a good idea at the time, and for many, it still is one of a short list of good ideas to come from the Federal Government Airline Deregulation . This allowed for more competion between airlines in more ways than ever before not only could they compete for customers on strictly a customer service stand point but also for the price of fares and the amount flights offered to the more popular destinations. Up until this â€Å"DEREGULATION†, the Federal Government through the Department of Transportation strictltly controlled the amount of flights an airline could schedule and the amount they could charge for these flights. Weather or any other problem could only have a limited effect on the â€Å"flight schedule† as only about one third as many flights were scheduled then as are scheduled today? Then what is considered by many to be one of a long list of oversights by The Federal Government nothing was done to the air traffic control system to account for the inevitable increase in passengers and flights scheduled. Much of the U.S.Air Traffic Control System was then and is now operating on World War II era technology with most of the updates coming only as needed to accommodate either the Cold War or NASA. Some twenty-two years latter the inevitable is now upon us .Consider this in the year of deregulation(1978) there were 250 million passengers carried by the US airlines in 1999 this number topped 650 million. All other factors being equal this would result in more passengers being delayed or canceled just by the growth of travel. Why does the older equipment cause so many problems ?The main reason is system overload with no more flexibility available in the system.

Miranda Complex in Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents Essay

The article of Jennifer Bess who is an assistant professor of Peace Studies at Coucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, starts with a quotation from Alice Walker’ s book The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart: A diary like this, with so many blank pages, seems to reflect a life permeated with gaps, an existence full of holes. But perhaps that is what happens when one’s experience is so intensely different from anything dreamed of as a child that there seems literally to be no words for it. This quotation is a kind of foreshadowing of what Bess puts forward in her article. The article starts with the background of the Miranda complex which is stated in the article’s title. It is mentioned that there is a girl named Miranda in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. She has all the privileges of her father’s administration over an island; however she states that â€Å" I have suffered/ with there that I saw suffer! â€Å" because of his father’s authoritarianism. From the gender point of view, she carries the burden of oppression and powerlessness of Caribbean people and also the burden of oppression â€Å"the benefits and protection offered by colonizing father and husband. † She is a victim and an inheritor of the forces of colonialism at the same time. According to the article, Julia Alvarez studies this complex inheritance in her autobiographically based novel How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. Alvarez’s characters tell many truths about their history and shared identity through Garcia girls. At the beginning of the novel, Alvarez goes back to the history of Garcia family to the time of Miranda . There were conquerors â€Å"encircling her own wrists† and she passes on these conquistadors to the Garcia sisters in the novel. The novel then emphasizes the themes of loss and violation; on the one hand there is a comfort and strength when the Garcia girls experience the female alliance and the richness of their shared Dominican experience; on the other hand however, they feel the pain of oppression. Because the privileged women of color tell only some parts of the story, her novel involves the mixed voices of silent people and the history’s loses along with Garcia family’s role in violence and victimization. According to the article, Alvarez’s characters come across wit the absence of memories so she must dig into the collective memory in order to uncover what remains of â€Å"common experience broken in time. Just like Miranda, the character Yolanda sympathizes with the others who suffer, however; she cannot identify herself with them completely because of her privilege, just as she cannot identify completely with Americans and even with her own extended family on the island. Her identity is fractured, unlike Miranda who depends on her father to fill in the gaps of her past, Yolanda takes the responsibility and writes her own past; in short she â€Å"recaptures the self† through her self creation. Alvarez’s characters cannot recover the loses of the past but with the exploration of Miranda’s complex, they transform â€Å"mandate of silence† into a revolution of truth telling and self-invention. For the Bess, the novel’s missing words and missing stories forms its theme; however the theme is not only one of loss ; it is also one in which Miranda faces the price of her family’s privilege. In other words, Alvarez uses absences and silence to expose the complexity of her characters’ inheritance, an inheritance shared by all â€Å"who have been shaped by the legacies of western expansion. Bess uses a quotation from Almanac of the Dead referring the alienation that the Garcia girls experienced; In Almanac of the Dead, Leslie Marmon Silko explains through a storyteller that the theory of the Big Bang was â€Å"consistent with everything else that he had seen: from their flimsy attachments to one another and their children to their abandonme nt of the land where they had been born,† westerners and those who have inherited their culture all share the same fate of alienation as do Adam and Eve, â€Å"wandering aimlessly because the insane God who had sired them had abandoned† and expelled them (1991, 258). She continues with another quotation stating that Silko calls the European as the orphaned children and thinks that the girls suffer after their exile: As Silko continues, â€Å"the Europeans had not been able to sleep soundly on the American continents, not even with a full military guard. They,† Like their heirs in Carlos and Yolanda, â€Å"suffered from nightmares and frequently claimed to see devils and ghosts† Their past, divided by the â€Å"river of bodies† left by the Haitian massacre and by the massacre of the natives hundreds of years before, will forever keep the Garcias orphaned spiritually.

Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBIs) in Adults and Children

Traumatic brain injuries have become an epidemic, affecting both children and adults. The effects of these brain injuries are severe however; they do differ in severity from youth to adult age in areas such as: cognitive and speech function, physical ability, fatigue, and headaches. America has been recognizing the severity of these injuries and sports and medicine have increased funding to prevent them. In order to properly decide what treatment is best for adults or youth suffering traumatic brain injuries one must conclude the differences between adult and youth symptoms, this proves challenging because the amount of adults suffering traumatic brain injuries is much fewer than adolescents. Another challenge faced when attempting to record and prevent these injuries is the lack of knowledge of symptoms; youth often misinterpret concussion symptoms and believe they have learning disabilities such as ADD and ADHD. Traumatic brain injuries have skyrocketed and cause significant amounts of hospitalizations each year. â€Å"It has been estimated that more than 1 million children sustain a TBI annually and that TBI accounts for more than 250, 000 pediatric hospital admissions as well as more than 10% of all visits to emergency service settings.† (Web journal) This may be a result of sports injury affecting youth because nearly 20% percent of concussions in children are caused from sports related injury. The amount of brain injuries for children each year is much higher than thoseShow MoreRelatedMedical Imaging Of Traumatic Brain Injuries Essay1520 Words   |  7 PagesMedical Imaging of Traumatic Brain Injuries INTRODUCTION Traumatic brain injuries (TBI) consist of pathological intracranial features of alteration in brain function cause by an outside force. TBI’s have plagued emergency rooms in recent years. TBI’s are the number one cause for death and disability in American youth and young adults. The drastic increase in TBI prognosis has been credited to reasons such as; increased competitiveness in sports, increased speeds of automobiles and/or speed limitsRead MoreImaging Of Traumatic Brain Injuries Essay1585 Words   |  7 PagesImaging of Traumatic Brain Injuries: An Investigative Report INTRODUCTION Traumatic brain injuries (TBI) consist of pathological intracranial characteristics of altered brain function cause by an outside force. TBI’s have plagued emergency rooms in recent years. TBI’s are the number one cause for death and disability in American youth and young adults. The drastic increase in TBI prognosis has been credited for reasons such as; increased competitiveness in sports, increased speeds of automobilesRead MoreResponse Inhibition Of Children With And Without Adhd After Traumatic Brain Injury942 Words   |  4 Pages H. (2013). Response inhibition in children with and without ADHD after traumatic brain injury. Journal of Neuropsychology, 7(1), 1-11. doi:10.1111/j.1748-6653.2012.02027.x Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI) share many of the same symptoms and in some cases, ADHD is even a consequence of TBI. This is known as secondary ADHD (S-ADHD). Likely due to impaired frontostriatal systems, we see a similarities in children with ADHD, S-ADHD, and TBI. OrnsteinRead MoreThe Rehabilitation Institute Of Southern California1949 Words   |  8 PagesSouthern California in Orange County (RIO) was initially established and founded in 1950 to improve the quality of life among disabled children and adults. Since then, the organization has branched off into two additional locations in Fullerton, CA and San Clemente, CA. With all facilities focusing on improving the quality of life among disabled children and adults, therapy programs range from social services, physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, and nursing services along withRead MoreBrain Structure and Post Traumatic Brain Injury Essay examples2430 Word s   |  10 PagesTraumatic brain injuries (TBI) have been shown to have a great impact on several specific structures in the brain of both immediate and long-term damage. Often preoccupation can be focused into the immediate outcomes. The immediate concerns of TBI are without doubt important but this often creates ignorance in terms of the long-term consequences that may follow an individual impacted by TBI into subsequent years. As one will come to recognize, this is of particular concern in terms of children who