Business functions: Practice based learning patchwork - Essay Example

Their tasks originate at daybreak at a village in the coffee-growing region of Yirgacheffe which is located in Ethiopia. Farmers bring sacks of raw coffee cherries to a market which has been set up by the local farming co-operative. The co-operative scales will weigh the coffee and the appropriate amount of money is now given to each farmer. At this point, if the farmer is capable of selling to a co-operative numerous times, the co-operative advances the farmer’s capital to invest before the harvest.

In other similar cases, a middle man might come to a farmer and offer to pay below the market rate and give him cash at that point of time so that the farmer is able to invest in his farm in order to be able to harvest his coffee supply. Several times, the farmer wishes to take that advance below market rate just to be able to feed his family. After the cherry that encloses the coffee bean is handpicked, it is left out to dry at the farm. So the farmer takes it from the plot to his house. The female workers then engage in the process of using the pulpers that perform the function of taking the pulp off the coffee bean, after which it is left to ferment in water and then scoured, after which it is dried out for further processing. . Moreover, the selling process is highly crucial as Starbucks purchases its coffee through a process of critical evaluation of the beans in order to make sure that there is a benchmark for the quality provided.

During this entire time, Starbucks has an obligation as roasters to make certain that they work with consistent quality-providing farmers, and also secure their future for them so that they can just concentrate on generating great quality that roasters like Starbucks can purchase by reimbursing premium prices instead of worrying what will happen with the coffee market in New York. According to Kim, Park and Prescott (2003) the manner in which multinational businesses are assimilated, global industries synchronize and monitor R&D, manufacturing, as well as marketing functions across borders that have important repercussions for performance.

They recommend that, in those global industries, definite integrating modes will be more operative than others in assimilating a function worldwide. They show that each task has a different combination of operative integrating modes. For global R&D incorporation, people-based and information-based modes are more operational than formalization-based and centralization-based modes. For manufacturing, people, information, and reinforcement are more active than centralization. In terms of marketing, information, as well as centralization, it is seen that these are more efficient than people and reinforcement.

They also determine that the co-alignment between definite and perfect profiles of integrating modes result in superior presentation. The outcomes reveal that people-based and information-based modes are generally more