Purchase Management
Note: Attempt all the Question,
All the questions carry equal marks, CASE 1
The Santek Images Business Unit Consolidated Products is a $21 billion company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. The company’s five business units, which offer a wide array of products and services, are the result of an aggressive strategy of mergers and acquisitions starting in the late 1980s. The corporate staff is surprisingly small, comprised of general management, legal staff, and human resources. Part of the reason for this small staff is due to the eclectic array of businesses housed within one corporate entity. A Business Week editor recently commented that “Consolidated Products could easily be broken up into five separate companies, since at one time it was five separate companies.” The editor also said that if the company “ever learned how to leverage its size in the marketplace, Consolidated Products could be a Wall Street powerhouse!” While Consolidated Products is a global corporation with facilities around the world, it operates each business unit as a highly independent and decentralized company. The corporate culture is best described as entrepreneurial, with each business unit being headed by an executive vice president who has complete profit and loss accountability. One of the business units, Santek Images, is the focus of this case.
Santek Images
Santek Images produces instant film and the imaging products that use that film for industrial applications. Increasingly, Santek has shifted much of its production requirements to oversees producers. The outsourcing of finished products, also called contract purchasing, represents a 180-degree shift from the vertically integrated model that Santek pursued during the 1970s and 80s. A key driver behind the outsourcing of non-core products was the realization that previous ways of doing business could not support 10-20 new-product launches a year, which
All the questions carry equal marks, CASE 1
The Santek Images Business Unit Consolidated Products is a $21 billion company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. The company’s five business units, which offer a wide array of products and services, are the result of an aggressive strategy of mergers and acquisitions starting in the late 1980s. The corporate staff is surprisingly small, comprised of general management, legal staff, and human resources. Part of the reason for this small staff is due to the eclectic array of businesses housed within one corporate entity. A Business Week editor recently commented that “Consolidated Products could easily be broken up into five separate companies, since at one time it was five separate companies.” The editor also said that if the company “ever learned how to leverage its size in the marketplace, Consolidated Products could be a Wall Street powerhouse!” While Consolidated Products is a global corporation with facilities around the world, it operates each business unit as a highly independent and decentralized company. The corporate culture is best described as entrepreneurial, with each business unit being headed by an executive vice president who has complete profit and loss accountability. One of the business units, Santek Images, is the focus of this case.
Santek Images
Santek Images produces instant film and the imaging products that use that film for industrial applications. Increasingly, Santek has shifted much of its production requirements to oversees producers. The outsourcing of finished products, also called contract purchasing, represents a 180-degree shift from the vertically integrated model that Santek pursued during the 1970s and 80s. A key driver behind the outsourcing of non-core products was the realization that previous ways of doing business could not support 10-20 new-product launches a year, which