Volkswagen Strategic Position Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4500 words

Volkswagen Strategic Position - Essay Example Volkswagen entered with a share of ownership of 50% for production and sell of cars in the markets of Greater China. Subsequently in 1991, Volkswagen expanded its operations with a second joint venture in the name of FAW-Volkswagen Automotive Company Ltd. The markets of Greater china are one of the major markets of the German automobile group. By 2004, the German automaker group has laid its strong foundation to forms its subsidiary by the name of Volkswagen Group China. The company is governed by a six member committee of senior management. The senior management is responsible for corporate governance and supervision of the group in Greater China. The members of the governing body are accountable for several divisions of the operations and management that include sales and marketing, finance, operations, personnel and government relations, technology, etc. By focusing on these key areas and strengthening its strategic position in Greater China, the Volkswagen Group China today has s ixteen offices that are spread across the country that caters to the automobile markets. Volkswagen over the years has not generated huge scales of revenue from the sell of cars in the markets of Greater China but is also a key contributor to the rapid pace of growth of the economy of China. The members of the governing body in Greater China are not only responsible for the supervision of its operations but also look at the opportunities for new investments for expansion of the markets of the group. Volkswagen group in China has expanded its volume of production of cars over the years with the optimal use of resources of production. The volume of sales of Volkswagen Group China has reached around 2.81... This essay stresses that since the entry of VW in China it has become the largest Automobile Company in the country. One of the biggest reasons of success of VW has been the choice of market entry strategy which happened to be JV. This helped the company to reduce the environmental risks and set up effective distribution network in the country. As a result China has become the second largest market for VW after VW. Volkswagen has very few weaknesses. Some of them have been discussed in this section. Has relatively low amount of new technology and skills over the competitors. The management of the company is also quite old. One of the major opportunities has been the entry of China into WTO which has opened up the economy inviting a lot more investment opportunities. Another major opportunity has been the growth of the Chinese automobile market. This paper makes a conclusion that the company should focus on augmentation through augmented services such as make to order sales programs to gain customers trust and market share. Volkswagen and the JV partners may have to invest a lot more to boost up the out capacity and to increase sales in China. In future Volkswagen may have to use china as the base or hub to explore the Asian market. Already Volkswagen has made it clear about plans to export cars made in China to different Asian countries. This may help the company to lower the cost and improve quality.

How Will Astronomy Archives Survive the Data Tsunami Case Study - 1

How Will Astronomy Archives Survive the Data Tsunami - Case Study Example Optimization techniques fail to create an efficient programmable dynamic query in case of astronomical data as data is present in bulk and is not usually centrally located. The disparate sources of data induce issue of network and bandwidth as well. When large chunks of data will be downloaded from disparate sources performance will be impacted as connections need to be established and maintained. Data is divided into different sources by a set criteria. This could be arranged date wise or could be based on specific type. The criteria even if incorporated in queries may not help much as the search that runs in dataset is time consuming. If data does not exist in data set time is required to load data from archives and search becomes intensive. There are various techniques used to provide better response times in such scenarios but the ever increasing data of astronomy that is stored in the database requires some special technique for data mining, machine learning and then update in t he systems (McLeod & Schell,  2007, p.  145). The requests made for specific data can be optimized by saving results of frequent query. Emerging researches will always produce new datasets which will take standard time. The infrastructure of archival data can be improved however the budget constraint of astronomical research hinders them from such an upgrade at the moment. Incompetent Archival Techniques: Modern day data is stored in a special environment that provides virtual drives hosted by third parties. This allows users to store data from different places online. This technology uses a web service that connects the client with the third party host systems. The customer has to depend on the reliability of the hosting party to provide reliability and security. In order to make systems available on cloud the whole time, third parties usually create redundant data on different virtual machines. If one machine is made unavailable due to a fault or network issue, other machines having the same data will be made available instantly. The astronomical data can be set on cloud to make it readily available. However, cloud computing has its own challenges as well. Such challenges include vulnerability of data attacks as the cloud is shared through a network and makes the data available through internet. The second issue is that of the third party supplier stability. The companies might lose down or merge with other companies resulting is partial or complete loss of data or other similar issues hence decreasing reliability of data on the cloud. There are a number of reasons why such a situation can arise. A supplier can go bankrupt, be bought by other large companies, it may expand and change the direction and interest of their business etc. Performance is again an issue in cloud as it is dependent on the available network bandwidth. Availability is impacted if a software failure occurs, network has a bottleneck or if a hardware fails. The last concern is cost of hosting a cloud platform. The budget constraints for an astronomical foundation may not allocate sufficient finances to meet the target of moving astronomical data on cloud. Emerging Technologies: The technologies currently in practice involve applying indexes on databases. These indexes are stored outside the database and increases the data access or recovery time. This does need advancement to a Peta byte level data management though. It is a challenge today to make efficient algorithms