601 Assign

ORGANIZATION ASSESSMENT

Question 1.

Apple employees are not covered by agreements of collective bargaining neither are they represented by trade unions currently. Trade unions and collective bargain agreements are not popular in the Silicon Valley tech industry giants such as apple. This fact has for long been attributed to the perceived employee loyalty to their hiring organizations. Partly this is because of the proactiveness of these organizations to hire and fire employees thus the employees seem a bit scared to start initiatives geared towards forming or joining an existing trade union. An appl employee in the year 2018 started the process of forming a trade union, an action which was not received warmly from the vast employees though this may be due to the cowardice of the employee to publicly support the initiative which the initiator says receives a lot of positive private responses (Calmfors & Horn, 2016). .

Question 2.

Apple organization has got 506 retail stores spread across the world in 24 countries. Some of these stores are run by expatriates who are recruited from various parts of the world and posted appropriately to serve the particular needs of the clients. These employees undergo training and receive subsequent support from the organization during the repatriation phase.

Question 3.

The internet is an important tool for any technological organization and apple is not an exception. On the contrary, apple extensively utilizes the internet to monitor progress and development of its employees around the world. This is done through various internet automated productivity evaluation programs run by the organization as well as employee development programs which seeks to assist the employee to adapt effectively to their work conditions and meet productivity thresholds set thereof through guidance of senior employees.

Question 4.

Apple ships products around the world ranging from phones, tablets, television screens computers, laptops as well as laptop and computer accessories. These products are mostly standardized especially with regard to hardware and form factors. Although these products receive different support services and differ with regard to software specifications. There do exist as well products which are specifically tailored with specifications for particular markets, though this is not a common phenomenon in the production practice of the organization.

Question 5.

The promotional tactics employed by the organization are largely similar to those practiced in the local market but for a few exceptions. In the Chinese market, the products are a bit more tailored to meet Chinese consumers’ tastes which include increase in the resources attached to the product as well as security enhancements. In the domestic as well as the rest of the international market, the promotional strategy is through continuous innovation tactics aimed at bettering of the product.

Question 6.

The distribution channels employed by the company are mostly reliant upon the retail stores that the organization owns across the globe. Complementary to these stores, the company works with various shipping organizations to have the products shipped to the customers who can order them online (Walla & Schweiger, 2017).

Question 7.

The company practices local procurement on a large scale with various requirements for production being sourced from various markets. These products include memory chipsets used to produce the electronic gadgets produced by the company as well as screens and in some cases processors.

Question 8.

The company practices global production. The design of apple products takes place in San Francisco, USA as the manufacturing of the products is done in China as well as India as apple seeks to tap into the low costs of manufacture in these countries as compared to the USA D (O'Rourke, 2018).

Question 9.

The company outsources goods for instance the screens of a number of their gadgets are bought from different manufacturers. Insourcing is also common at apple for instance the use of apple designed processors is an iconic feature of the various apple products (Balaji, Qian & Moolsintong, 2016).

Question 10.

The supply chain of electronics is led by major technological companies among which Apple is one of the leaders. Major competition for Apple is by Samsung, Huawei, Lg as well as Blackberry (Chan, Pun & Selden, 2016).

Question 11.

Import and export of goods is through procurement of supply contracts which are not significantly affected by currency fluctuations around the world because of the trading terms agreed by the organizations during the signing if contracts and these contracts are not modified to cope with currency fluctuations (Chan, Pun & Selden, 2015).

References

Calmfors, L., & Horn, H. (2016). Trade Unions, Wage Formation and Macroeconomic Stability. Springer.

Chan, J., Pun, N., & Selden, M. (2015). AND TRADE UNIONS. The Routledge Companion to Labor and Media, 290.

Chan, J., Pun, N., & Selden, M. (2016). Apple, Foxconn, and China’s new working class. ILR Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press.

Walla, P., & Schweiger, M. (2017). Samsung versus Apple: smartphones and their conscious and non-conscious affective impact. In Information Systems and Neuroscience (pp. 73-82). Springer, Cham.

D O'Rourke, A. (2018). The world apple market. Routledge.

Balaji, S. K., Qian, A., & Moolsintong, P. J. (2016). U.S. Patent No. 9,485,338. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.