Expert Answers

Question:

This assessment addresses the following subject learning outcomes:

Develop own professional practice and ethical standards around business problems and implementation of solutions

Toward the end of the trimester, take your learning journal and then build a narrative that summarises the journey and learnings you undertook while studying this subject. You should refer to specific journal entries and/or extracts from learning activities to demonstrate your learning. You should refer to how you can apply the learnings in your future career or the organisation you currently work for. Should you wish to you can focus your self reflection on one aspect of the subject from the following topics :

- Business Intelligence and Big data
- Cybersecurity
- Agile Methods and system development
- CRM technologies
- SCM Technologies

There is no required format for the assessment. Students should use initiative and be sure to conform to the APA referencing style, making use of external sources as appropriate. Be sure to bookend your assignment with an introduction and conclusion. You may also like to append your learning activities or other artefacts that demonstrate the attainment of your learning or the ways in which the learning materials have affected you personally.

Stevens District Hospital is a 162-bed acute care hospital that is qualified as a not for profit facility. The hospital was originally a county-owned facility and its status was transferred to an independent facility three years ago. The hospital receives no external funding from government agencies for operations. The hospital is accredited by The Joint Commission and received reaccreditation during their triannual survey last year. The hospital has an aggressive quality management program and a low volume of medical malpractice claims. The hospital is located in Jefferson City, which is a city of 50,000 with 80,000 in the regional market. The hospital provides a general range of acute care services, including medical/surgical, rehab, and emergency care.

Mission and Vision

Our mission: To improve health by providing high-quality care, a comprehensive range of services, and exceptional service.

Our vision: Stevens District Hospital and its affiliates will be the health care provider of choice for physicians and patients. Our five year vision is to create a large, multispecialty physician practice system that would include at least six family practice physicians and specialists in cardiology, oncology, and women’s services. Currently, the hospital employs three family practice physicians, one obstetrician, one medical oncologist, and one non-invasive cardiologist.

Technology

A competing hospital has added e-visits for physician practices, which is causing a shift of patients to the competitor hospital's physician practices.

Regulatory Changes

Health care reform through the Affordable Care Act has increased the number of patients with some form of insurance payment. These patients are now seeking care in greater numbers from a primary care physician. Stevens District Hospital struggles with accommodating patient scheduling requests to establish care with a primary care physician.

Questions 1. Create a database to keep track of books, authors, publishers, and the employees that work with each publisher. The database also keeps information about the jobs that employees can do at a publishing company. An Excel spreadsheet Assignment1Data.xlsx containing the data to be stored at creation (initial load) is provided. There are six tables: Authors, BookAuthor, Books, Employees, Publishers, and Jobs. Each table must have a primary key, relationships between tables must be defined, and relationships must enforce referential integrity. The following guidelines are given about the tables. a. Authors are in Canada and each one has an Id, first name, last name, phone, postal code, province, sex, salary, birth date and a book subject. The Id is the primary key. b. For each book, we keep track of the title Id, the title of the book, publisher, price, advance for the author, year-to-date sales (quantity sold to date), and the publication date. The primary key is the titleId. c. Several authors can publish a book. Information about authors and the book in which they were an author stored in the BookAuthors table. The database also keepstrack of the ordering of author names and how often each author is paid a royalty. The primary key for this table is composite, comprising of the author Id and the title Id of the book authored. d. For each publisher, we keep track of the publisher Id (which consists of 4 digits), name, city, state, and country. The publisher Id is the primary key. e. Employees work with specific publishers. The database keeps track of employee first name, middle initial, last name, job Id, job level, publisher with which they work and their hire date. Several employees can work for the same publisher and may have the same job id. Employees are identified by their employee Id (empId). f. The jobs that employees do are stored in the Jobs table. The database keeps track of the job Id, description, min job level required for this position. A job is identified by the Job Id. 2. Choose datatypes and properties that are most appropriate for each field. For instance, names must be text, dates must be date/time and so on. Also note the following: a. Make all fields required, except for employee middle initial and publisher state (since some countries do not have states). b. Include a validation rule and text for book prices: Price must be greater than $0. c. Assume that the following fields only allow data having the same structure/format as the given initial data. Add an appropriate Format and/or Input mask for the following fields. Also set any other applicable property for the fields and any other field based on the given data. i. titleId of books ii. publisherId iii. Author phone iv. Author postal code v. Books publication date d. Include a lookup for sex field, so that the domain is limited to F, M, or U. 3. Create the following relationships. A lookup must be included for each foreign key. a. A book may have many authors / books have an author b. An author may have several books / books may have several authors c. A book has a publisher / a publisher may be the publisher for many books d. An employee works with a publisher / a publisher may have many employees e. An employee has a job / a job may be done by many employees 4. Add some data manually as follows: a. Make yourself the Chief Executive Officer of a new publishing firm that is based in Winnipeg, Canada. You may make up any required data not specified, as necessary. b. Add a new book with two authors. Make yourself the first author. The book is published by the publishing firm at which you are the CEO. You may make up a name for the second author and other necessary data that is not provided. 5. Design the queries to do the following: a. List all the employees (first name, last name, job level and hire date) working with the publisher called Algodata InfoSystems. The list must be in order ascending order of job level. If two employees have the same job level, they must be listed in ascending order by their last name. The order of the columns must be as specified above. b. List all books (title, publisher, publication date, number of authors) with 2 or more authors. c. List all books (title, publisher, publication date) published in 2013 where the total year to date sales from the book has exceeded $5000. d. List the authors (Id, first name, last name) that published a book before their 21 st birthday. e. List the id, first name and title of books by all authors whose subject is ‘Action’. List must be in ascending order by id and then by book title if an author has more than 1 book. The columns must be in the order specified above. f. Accept a job level and display a list of jobs (with all details) that the job level can qualify for given the minimum level required for each job. Columns of your query result must be shown in the display order specified and must also satisfy any sort order specified.

Task

Students require to do a mini research, which is based on the given subject areas (maritime transportation, land transportation, passenger transportation) to examine the related issues. Students should complete two mini research topics. 

Topic A – Air Cargo Safety

Discuss the merits and drawbacks to regulate the delivery of lithium battery by means of air (passenger/cargo). You need to refer to a recent accident between the years 2016 and 2019 concerning the delivery of lithium battery by air. Your discussion should include: (i) the background of the news; (ii) regulations by IATA/ICAO; (iii) whether the shipper, freight forwarder and/or carrier follow the regulations; and (iv) the impact of this issue, etc. You should also provide the original news (screen capture or electronic version) as appendix. Provide reference whenever appropriate.

Topic B – Air Cargo Industry in Hong Kong

Hong Kong was the world's seventh largest trading economy in 2018, underpinned by its efficient transportation and logistics facilities among others. Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA) has been ranked as the world's busiest for international cargo every year, notwithstanding its handling charges being considered as among the highest in the world.

Do a study on success and future of air cargo industry in Hong Kong. Explain the reasons why Hong Kong has increasing air cargo traffic in past decade and foresee the future of Hong Kong container port industry.

An analyst for Black Moon Ltd, an airline, is doing some simulation models of the mainrisks faced by the company. One of the more important unknowns is the future price of jet fuel.The analyst decides to model the average jet fuel priceJover the next financial year, in dollars perbarrel, as a random variable with the pdff(x) =?????????x7200, 0?x <601120, 60?x <1001120e(100?x)/50, 100?x(a) Devise a procedure for generating random variates according to the pdff.(b) Use your procedure to generate 100000 random variates according to the distribution, and drawa histogram with the vertical axis scaled so as to give an estimate of the pdf. (Hint.R has afunction calledifelsethat may be useful.)(c) Find the exact expected values of(i)J;(ii)max(J,50).(d) Use a simulation to estimate the above expected values. Give the estimates in the form of 95%confidence intervals.1

2 Black Moon is known for carefully adjusting the prices of its tickets in the final days andhours before a flight departs. One of its favourite tricks is to increase the asking price of a ticket by10% after each ticket sale. For example, if the fourth-to-last seat on a flight is sold for $100, thenthe third-to-last will be priced at $110, the second-to-last at $121, and the last remaining seat at$133.10.Suppose this strategy is adopted for a flight departing in exactly 120 hours’ time. At the beginningof this period there are 13 unsold seats with an advertised price of $250 (although in accordance withthe pricing strategy, only the first of these will actually be sold at that price). Potential buyers areassumed to arrive as an inhomogeneous Poisson process with rate?(t) =16140?t, for 0?t?120. Theamounts that the buyers are willing to spend are distributed uniformly between $150 and $800, andindependent of each other and of the arrival times.(a) What is the expected number ofpotentialbuyers of these seats?(b) Devise a method for simulating the potential buyers. Use your method to generate one realiza-tion, and list that realization’s potential buyers in order of their arrival, including their arrivaltimes and the amounts they are willing to spend. Use the last four digits of your student ID asthe random seed.(c) Perform a simulation with 5000 realizations to estimate how many of the 13 seats will be sold.Make a histogram of this quantity, and give a 95% confidence interval for its expectation. Youshould use thesim.revenuefunction fromsimulation.R.txt.(d) Black Moon is experimenting with an alternative strategy in which the ticket price is increasedby 10% every 10 hours, regardless of how the ticket sales are going. Re-do the histogram andconfidence interval for this case.3. The Black Moon customer service counter at Auckland Airport is typically staffed byone person. We model the arrival of customers at the counter as a Poisson process of rate 0.3 perminute, and the times taken to serve customers as independent exponentially-distributed randomvariables with rate 0.5 per minute. If necessary, customers form a first-come-first-served queue.(a) What is the distribution of the number of customers present when this system is operating insteady state? What is the mean number of customers present? For what fraction of the timeare there no customers present?(b) Use the queueing-simulation web page to perform a simulation of the customer-service counter.Make estimates, with 95% confidence intervals, of(i)the mean number of customers present;(ii)the fraction of the time for which there are no customers present.(c) An alternative model of the counter, meant to reflect particularly busy periods, has a customerarrival rate of 1.1 per minute and models the customer service times using a lognormal distribu-tion instead of an exponential distribution (though the mean and standard deviation remain thesame). With this model, it is clearly not possible for a single employee to operate the counter.How many staff are needed, and what will happen if there are fewer than that?(d) Repeat the simulation of part (b) for the alternative model, using the minimum possible numberof staff and assuming that waiting customers form themselves into a single queue. What now isthe mean number of customers presen

There are five learning outcomes which must be addressed in appropriate depth in order to pass the assignment:
1. Formulate researchable questions and devise approaches to answer these.
2. Systematically collect and critically analyse the research literature.
3. Critically analyse the implications of the different health and social care research designs for clinical/professional practice.
4. Reflect critically upon the purpose and mechanisms of research ethics and governance
5. Appraise the significance of alternative epistemological positions, and evaluate the logical and epistemological issues that affect the choice of research method.
You need to do this by undertaking a critical review of selected research in a field which is of interest to you and relevant to your field of practice.To pass the module you will need to achieve a minimum mark of 50%
Step by step guidance
The assignment should contain the following:
? Title
? Introduction
? Searching for and selecting relevant literature
? Critical appraisal of three selected studies
? Consideration of alternative research designs which could have been used
? Conclusion
? References
? Appendices
Getting started First of all you need to give serious consideration to your choice of topic. Is there something in which you have a special interest in or which might allow you to improve practice in some way? Before settling on a choice you need to do some exploring and get a feel for what is currently known and how up-to-date the research is. Remember, you are appraising available research not writing rationale for undertaking your own, so you need to select a topic where a sufficient amount is available.

In each module, you have a learning activity "Journal - Reflections on Business News". You should become a regular consumer of business and economic news so that you can reflect on what is happening in the business world - locally, nationally, and globally. At the end of each Module, post a new discussion thread with a link to the article that you found interesting and write a short reflection (1-3 paragraphs) on how you think this article links to a topic we've covered in this course. Examples: The article "KFC is looking into plant-based chicken alternatives" might get you to reflect on how the trend of alternative protein is a driving force or a trend in PESTEL (Chapter 3) that is forcing companies to at least consider options. KFC might also recognize that A&W has been successful with their Beyond Meat burger and so they need to pay attention to the competitive forces in the fast food industry. The article “How a cheap, brutally efficient grocery chain is upending America's supermarkets might get you to think about the value chain analysis (Chapter 4 & 5) and give you some clear examples of how Aldi is able to drive value for customers while keeping costs low. Throughout the course you will add to the same discussion topic so that by the end of the course you will have a portfolio of news articles that have been collected as a group.

Task:

Each student will prepare a research paper on an Acquisitions Business issue of his or her choice. The research paper should be 8-10 pages in length and include at least four bibliographic references in addition to the course text. References should be listed at the end of the paper and should follow the American Psychological Association (APA) formatting.

The APA web site can be consulted for assistance. Topic: Describe the major types of relationships that exist today between the DoD and corporate America in the acquisitions field

Your response must include a cover page, a summary of the case study and responses to all questions. The responses should contain all data, research and external resources that support your responses. A reference page will include all resources you used in responding to the questions. IMPORTANT: SUMMARY, ANSWERS TO 4 QUESTIONS, CONCLUSION, MINIMUM 8 EXTERNAL REFERENCES 1. Analyze Amazon's management principles. What lessons can other business leaders learn from Bezos? 2. Analyze the overall profitability of the offline retail industry. Is the industry attractive? 3. Define Amazon's competitive advantages. Why is Amazon so successful? 4. What strategies should Amazon employ to expand into the offline retail industry?

Question:

This assignment assesses your secondary research skills and your ability to follow the rules of academic writing. The topic is the 4Ps (product, price, place and promotion), which is also called the “marketing mix”. You need to compare and contrast how effective the application of the 4Ps is for one pair of brands (NOT ALL OF THEM) from the list below.

Analyse the effectiveness of the marketing mix for any given company or brand.

Demonstrate knowledge of STP marketing planning process.

You need to carry out in-depth research into the brand’s target market (who they are, their likes/dislikes, their levels of personal disposable income etc.) using market research databases – e.g. Mintel reports, WARC and TGI. You then need to look at the brands themselves, their brand values and competitive positioning in the market before going on to discuss their application of the 4Ps – product, price, place and promotion. The key to getting a good mark on this is to prepare a comparative analysis. Do not describe the brands in isolation – always look at the two together and explain why they do things differently.

This assignment should be based on secondary and observational research only. You are not required to carry out any form of primary research. You need to research the following:

1. Target Market

You need to develop a detailed target market profile for each brand using data sources such as Mintel, the companies’ own websites and other secondary sources. You need to think about age, gender, personal disposable income, social class, level of education, family life cycle, lifestyles, other brands they like, TV programmes they watch, hobbies etc.

2. Product /Brand

Using Levitt’s model of a brand, try to analyse your two selected brands (their shape, packaging, colour scheme etc.). How different are they at the functional and emotional level? What are the brand values that the companies are trying to portray? In addition, have a look at Aaker’s brand personality framework to see which personality type(s) each brand follows.

3. Price

You need to carry out some on-line and in-store research to establish a market price for each of the brands and any competing products. Display all this competitive pricing research in a table and draw conclusions about which pricing strategy they are adopting.

4. Place (Distribution)

You need to look at channel management. Which stores stock this product? Is it a mass market product where the company has maximised distribution outlets, or is it a luxury brand where  distribution is deliberately limited? Explain your answer. If possible, take photos of the product instore/on-line. What does this tell you about brand values?

5. Promotion

You need to research their past methods of communication (e.g. cinema, TV, outdoor, print, social media, mobile, own website etc.). Which communication methods do they use to build their respective brands? – and how do they do this? How are they positioning themselves in the minds of target audiences? (E.g. affordable, luxury, healthy, socially conscious etc.) You only have 1500 words for your report so you need to decide what goes in the appendices. It is suggested that you follow this structure for your work.

THIS IS WRITTEN LAST (because it is a summary of your research) BUT IT APPEARS FIRST (before the contents page), in order to catch the attention of the reader and encourage them to read further. It should cover in one page or less:

· The aim of the report,

· The methods of research,

· The results (top-line summary only)

This should be quite brief – it’s NOT a detailed coverage of a 100 years of corporate history. It should include the aim of the report and some background information on each of the chosen brands – I.E a brief description of the brands with useful data such as market share, market size and trends in sales, which you can find from the most recent Mintel reports as well as in the trade press.

Use sub-headings to make your report easier to follow. We suggest you adopt the following headings:

1. Comparison of Target Markets

2. Product - Evaluation of the Products and their Brand Values

3. Price - Evaluation of the Pricing Strategies Used

4. Place - Distribution of the Brands

5. Promotion – Communication of the Brands

Have you read and understood the assessment criteria?

Have you met the learning outcomes? You will lose marks and your work may evenbe failed if you have not.

Have you demonstrated you can think and write critically in the completed work?This means you have supported your arguments/explanations appropriately e.g.  using relevant academic sources and you have offered discussion points which extends your own or others’ viewpoints to make reasoned conclusions/judgements.

Have you maintained an academic tone throughout your work? Is your work formal, focused, developed and clear?

Have you checked that the referencing in your assignment is in line with your programme requirements?

Have you proof-read your work and used spellcheck software to check your spelling and grammar?

Have you checked the presentation of your work is as specified by your tutor, for example, are font size, colour,style, line spacing and margins as the tutor specified?

Have you kept to the word count (or equivalent)? If you are not sure, check with your tutor. Can you confirm that the work submitted is your own and not plagiarised?