Analysis
Essays

The primary marketing challenge at Flare Fragrances is to develop an appropriate and competitive marketing strategy for the new Savvy brand to be launched in 2009. The specific issues in this challenge include the question of whether to launch Savvy in the first place, whether to distribute it through conventional or through new channels, and whether to associate it with the Loveliest umbrella brand or to give it a separate identity. The industry is experiencing a decline because of the economic crisis and sales at Flare Fragrances grew by only 2% in 2008 although overall performance was average given the economic challenges. Improving performance in the coming years will require a significant improvement in sales, either through existing or new products. Advertising expenditure is also a major question to be addressed. A major competitor, Aromatique, plans to introduce Dulcet, a product similar to Savvy for the same target market in the coming year, increasing the challenge for Flare.

Information protection and its management has become the most vital task encountered by IT organizations as information's value to the business can vary depending on the data type and its present stage of its lifespan. The importance of applying Information Lifecycle Management--ILM technology lies in correctly managing information subject to its relative importance to the enterprise at a given point of time across its lifecycle. It is crucial to note there that ILM is not just a storage based methodology, but covers a wide-ranging contents and records management system as well that are leveraged to assist in dealing with corporate and regulatory data preservation and safeguarding governance needs. Hence data becomes information when its content is capable of being used within a context.

This paper is about the financial health and capital structure of eBay, Clorox and Darden Restaurants. These companies are described, and then several of their financial statistics (ROE, ROA, beta, revenue, current assets, etc.) are described. Implications for the optimal capital structure of these companies are then discussed along with recommendations.

This paper is based on the Guillermo Furniture Store scenario at the University of Phoenix. The Guillermo scenario is about a furniture maker in Sonora, Mexico, who is facing adverse external environmental conditions. He must choose among three options for his business going forward, doing an NPV calculation and sensitivity analysis.

This paper examines a legal hypothetical about a state (Confusion) enacting a law that would require all truckers traveling through the state to use a certain type of trailer hitch, which is only manufactured by a single manufacturer in Confusion. It investigates which court would have jurisdiction over the issue, whether diversity jurisdiction would apply, and whether the statute is constitutional. The paper also describes the stages of a civil trial.

This paper covers a DuPont analysis of Target Corporation (NYSE: TGT). There is a company overview, industry overview, competitor overview and a discussion of the firm's financials. Then, a DuPont analysis is provided and the findings of this analysis are discussed in order to determine what the changes in the company's ROE over the past five years mean for investors.

The plan has been written in order to guide our mobile phone export business. Cell phones in Moldova are rapidly overtaking land phones as many cellular phones now provide Internet access and cell phone computers. SMS, MMS and broadband are becoming standard features on cell phones. Nonetheless, mobile phones are expensive in Moldova and not everyone can afford them. Furthermore, although Moldova has made great lines in improving their technology in the telecommunications area, there is still line for improvement. Cellphones need to be upgrade to a 4G level. At the moment they are ranked at 2G and 3G. Moldovan Cellular Phones can find their niche by exporting refurbished cheap mobile phones to Moldova, introducing cheap policies and incentives, and providing Moldavians with quality mobile phones at competitive prices. The potential for success is huge.

The real war that contestants had to fight in World War II was for the preservation of their humanity and mores. A number of first-hand accounts of this martial affair elucidate this fact. The ravages of war and the decimation and destruction it caused directly conflicted with conventional senses of right, wrong, and how to act accordingly.

Toyota Motor Corporation is one of the largest and most diversified auto manufacturers globally today, with supply chains and production systems that span across over 70 nations with sourcing, procurement and quality management systems unified to their manufacturing centers. The high level of complexity inherent in these operations have made it essential for Toyota to create one of the most advanced supply chain management systems globally, the Toyota Production System (TPS) (Dyer, Nobeoka, 2000). This system is the galvanizing force of their entire operations and is so complete in its coverage of supply chain operations, it takes approximately one year to get suppliers up to speed and to the point of meeting quality standards on it (Toyota Investor Relations, 2012). The TPS is a foundational element of the mission and mission of Toyota as well. As is stated in the company's annual reports and on the investor relations area of their website their mission is "To attract and attain customers with high-valued products and services and the most satisfying ownership experience worldwide and in key markets including America " (Toyota Investor Relations, 2012),. To attain these high levels of customer satisfaction, all aspects of the Toyota business model must be synchronized to deliver the greatest levels of reliability possible at the lowest costs. The vision statement of Toyota as also defined in their financial statements is "To be the most successful and respected car company worldwide and in key markets including America" (Toyota Investor Relations, 2012). Despite the recalls that occurred in the 2010 and 2011 timeframe, Toyota continues to reinvest in and continually look for how they can best improve worldwide Total Quality Management (TQM) performance, taking into account House of Quality, Lean Six Sigma and quality functional management initiatives, all aimed at increasing the reliability of their vehicles by driving up the quality levels of suppliers (Takahashi, 2010). Toyota launched an extensive internal audit of their own to determine the factors surrounding the recalls and learned that specific factories had taken shortcuts and at one point had not performed supplier audits of incoming components in well over two months (Minhyung, 2010). Internally Toyota had lost sight of its core values of product quality within the plants that had been the catalyst of the faulty products being produced that led to the globally embarrassing vehicle recalls (Johar, Birk, Einwiller, 2010). Toyota is a very resilient, very analytically-driven culture and took the lapse in quality as a major challenge to improve. This became the catalyst of a renewed emphasis on quality and an even more stringent level of supplier quality management processes, procedures and systems (Toyota Investor Relations, 2012). The intent of this analysis is to evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of Toyota Motor Company. The strengths and weaknesses will be analyzed from the internal environmental perspective, and the opportunities and threats from the external environment standpoint. Of the most potentially debilitating factors the company is facing today, product recalls and product quality could have a very detrimental effect on the value of the brand over time, a factor Toyota mentions in their quarterly filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) (Toyota Investor Relations, 2012). As Toyota is a very analytically-driven organization that has a strong engineering emphasis, their filings with the SEC also indicate their greatest potential growth is ahead of them with their intensive spending on research and development (R&D) in hybrid and hydrogen vehicles (Toyota Investor Relations, 2012). Presented below is an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Toyota followed by an assessment of their opportunities and threats.

This paper reviews the literature to determine many prisons are privately run and how many prisons are run by the government and which of these public or private approaches produces a better job of running a financially sound prison. A discussion concerning the respective advantages and disadvantages of a privately operated prisons compared to government-run prisons is used to determine junctures in the provision of services as well as departures and significant differences. A discussion of the views of the U.S. Bureau of Justice concerning privately operated prisons is followed by an overall assessment of private versus government-operated prisons, including costs to the average America tax payer to build new prisons and the profits typically generated by privately operated prisons, to identify which approach provides optimal results. A summary of the research and important findings are provided in the conclusion.