Operations Management (OM)

Short Paper: Assessment of Key Industry Changes for Amazon

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Assessment of Key Industry Change of Amazon

The impact of change on the supply chain of the company will greatly influence the entire Amazon organization operation and create a new level of competition in the market.

Impact of change in the industry

Through the upgrade of the technology and required change in its supply chain, the company will be able to meet its efficient distribution level that will set the company to a new course of production. Some of the changes are: Artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and the business-ready internet of things to build connecting devices and machines to gather data, automate processes, and streamline operations.

The major impacts that are expected to occur on the company are; “the decrease in the whole food prices, the availability of the whole foods products on Amazon.com, and Amazon’s prime reward program will be available for whole foods customers.” The change will also negatively impact the organization and employees through job replacement by the technology. Also, the change will set the organization towards investing more in commerce and tripping off the traditional retailers (Stadtler, 2015).

Key obstacles and opportunities that have enabled or inhibited the companies change

Amazon enjoys economies of scale of being one of the best-doing business in America with its revenue rising on daily basis. One best opportunity that has led to required change is the increased number of customers served and the continued demand for the company to diversify its services (Christopher, 2016). Apart from the continued incredible performance by the company the change has been faced with challenges such as the increased competition in the market which has also led to increasing the list of mergers and acquisition.

Conclusion

In summary, the Amazon change will greatly improve the organizational effectiveness and eliminate the competition in the market along with changing the face of online marketing by the application of being the most efficient service delivery (Cummings & Worley, 2014).

Professor Feedback

Impact of Change: The paper described the impact of change and included artificial intelligence and 3D printing as key factors.  However, there wasn't any discussion as to how AI and 3-D printing impacts Amazon.  When a statement is made about something being the impact of change, it's expected that the statement will be supported by various examples of how those items are impacting the change.

The impact that was discussed in detail was the decrease in whole food prices and it was stated that change would negatively impact Amazon.  How would it negatively impact Amazon?  Would it be a decrease in revenue?  Would it cause jobs to be lost?  I would argue the decrease in food prices could actually increase Amazon's revenue and footprint. 

Key Obstacles/ Opportunities: The paper identified the key obstacles and opportunities that drove change for Amazon; however, there appears to be some contradictory statements that lack supporting details.  One sentence discusses Amazon as "one of the best at doing business in America," yet another statement indicates Amazon is facing a challenge through increased competition.  What is missing is how the increased competition is impacting Amazon.  Has Amazon lost market share?  Has their stock price dropped?  Has another company moved up quickly behind Amazon whereby having a good opportunity to overthrow Amazon as the #1 online shopping retailer?  Please provide more details when strong statements are made to support that statement. 

Enabling/Inhibiting Factors: The key obstacles/opportunities and enabling/inhibiting factors were one simple paragraph which is lacking in details.  The key opportunities were touched, but there did not appear to be any discussion of enabling or inhibiting factors to Amazon's success or demise. 

From a points perspective, I could not award the 22.5 points given the significant lack of details for the key factors.  However, I do believe an attempt was made; therefore, I didn't give zero points.  I awarded 15 points to allow for improvement on the future assignments.  

Articulation of Response: The paper has some errors related to grammar, spelling, syntax, organization, sentence structure or citations that negatively impact the readability or articulation of the main ideas.

References

Christopher, M. (2016). Logistics & supply chain management. Pearson UK.

Cummings, T. G., & Worley, C. G. (2014). Organization development and change. Cengage Learning.

Stadtler, H. (2015). Supply chain management: An overview. In Supply chain management and advanced planning (pp. 3-28). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.