This building scheme is basically a table of contents that you can fill out with your own line of reasoning concerning your company problem and that will show you in a concise way if your Graduation proposal will have coherence and structure. Please be aware that your company problem will most likely have multiple alternative ways in which you can frame it so feel free to add columns and see which storyline comes across as most convincing. In order to make this exercise effective you will have to adhere to some rules: only bullet points and short sentences, has to fit on a single page. Feel free to change or elaborate on the given structure. This is just the basic formatting, try to see the needs of your research.
This building scheme provides ample input for discussion with your supervisor and provides an easy starting point to write your graduation proposal. Once you filled out this building scheme, check it yourself for coherence and consistency.
Structure Content
Project objective
What?
Problems and symptoms, what exactly and precisely are you going to solve?
The time consuming and high error potential process of communicating and data entry of exiting UK customers of Dutch Bakery.
Why?
Why should we care? What is the relevance and urgency?
Because it is easy in the existing system to make errors a lot of tension is caused within the company and between departments as this also causes a lot of wasted time and miscommunications, also to its UK customers. This can be seen back in the insufficient service level offered to the UK customers.
RQ
Plain and simple, as a guideline to keep you on track: what are you trying to achieve?
How to be more efficient and effective when trading with existing UK customers of Dutch Bakery to increase the service level within one year?
Exploration
Situational analysis What has been done so far? What do we need to know from the company before you can suggest a possible solution?
How is the company trading with it’s UK customers at the moment, what frustrates the employees, how is the system build up, how do the UK customers see Dutch Bakery.
Theoretical Framework How can you best understand your problem? From which angle/perspective? (SBD-SCM: remember the chair)
As independent consultant looking at Dutch Bakery where and how mistakes are made and what has to be improved and looking at the UK customers too see what they think of their relationship with Dutch Bakery and how they think it could be better.
Proposed solution
What entails your solution?
A solution could be automation of the systems; at the moment three different programs are used from ordering to actually transporting the product to the UK.
Why will this solve your business issue?
Entering all the data in the different systems takes a lot of time and it is easy to make mistakes because the programs are quite complex. When automating the programs a lot of time and frustration can be saved, which increases the service level to the UK customers.
Methodology
What is the overall setup of your research? Research design is just your plan of attack
First thing I will do is observe Dutch Bakery and the UK costumers after that communicating with both parties and gather other useful information, then analyze what I have. After that I will come with a conclusion and recommendation and last analyze if what I did also really worked.
Data collection
What are you actually going to collect? Where? From who? How?
The information I am going to collect will come from Dutch Bakery itself, What do the people who are responsible for the UK think of the current situation and what has to be improved. This will be done through interviews, surveys and just talking to people. Also information will be gathered from the UK companies by asking what the think of the current relationship and what has to be improved to create an even stronger relationship, this will be done by contacting the UK companies. Furthermore, additional information will be gathered from the internet, looking at competitors and reading applicable books.
Data Analysis
How will you test your solution based on the gathered data?
By implementing and using my solution in real life and asking what Dutch Bakery employees think of the new situation. Also asking the UK companies if they see improvement in the relationship and service level of Dutch Bakery. Furthermore, looking at the numbers if everyone really works more efficient and affective and if time waste and frustrations go down.