The Impact of Cultural Communication on Team Performance

The trend in today’s corporate workforce continues to move towards becoming more culturally diverse; while beneficial, to maintain competitive edge this element also increases functional challenges between working group members. In order to achieve a high performing team, it is imperative management understands the cultural and lingual differences among the individual members, and develop practices that diminish these challenges. Workforce diversity has been identified as being able to add value to the overall outcome; however, success ultimately depends on the team’s ability to interact culturally, communicate effectively, and understand the mannerisms unique to each team member’s individual culture. Examining Geert Hofstede’s work; a model that quantitatively measures cultural differences, the authors start their discussion on factors that lead to cultural norms and highlight, through management practices, ways to minimize challenges and increase interaction in the team environment. Once members understand the individual nuances of culture midst their counterparts, the team can focus on an equally important aspect to becoming a high performing team; effective communicating. Next, the authors move the analysis to address the hurdles centered around team member’s linguistical challenges. This facet too presents a set of unique challenges; which, if not addressed properly, can lead to poor performance and a lack of trust among the group. Finally, the authors conclude by identifying the unique nonverbal communication norms, among cultures, which too can adversely affect a team’s performance. This paper looks to synthesize the literature which highlights these three aspects of communication in the team environment

Engineering Resource Selection to Support Electrical Packaging Efforts at a Heavy Trucking OEM

Corporate resource management is a topic of high complexity and is of high interest for corporate management. It requires companies and managers to hire, allocate, move and fire resources as needed to facilitate the corporate direction. When hiring a resource it is important to determine what the roles and responsibilities for that resource might be now and in the future. It is then important to match those requirements against the skills and expectations of that resource. This paper aims to quantify and analyze the differences between different engineering resource types using a modified HDM (Hieratical Decision Model) method. The model modification uses a data gathering adjustment to reduce the expert survey complexity and reduce the expert inconsistency to zero. The HDM model was developed based on expert feedback and experience. The model was then used to review the hiring criteria, its driving factors and how they relate to several different types of hirable resources. This study is limited to this specific use case as it removes an entire resource class due to hiring limitations at the company used for this analysis. A future study could be performed to determine the impacts of this omitted resource type. Additionally, this analysis uses expert expectations for resource performance and not measured data. An additional analysis could be completed to use the actual performance data rather than the expected

ChopStop: A Strategic Plan

This project is an analysis of the current strategies that ChopStop, a saw manufacturing company should take in the wake of the business environment today. The goal of the project is to identify the Mission, Vision and Values of the company and use these to steer the direction of the organization moving forward. This project will center on the principles and tools taught by the ETM 525 class, the text Strategic Management Competitiveness and Globalization and the tools explained between them. First, the team starts with framing the organization, its history and their milestones. We then introduce the AIM system and its importance to the ChopStop product. After a thorough competitive and product analysis, our team introduces three individual strategies which help achieve the overall goal of expanding sales and expanding the market share of the ChopStop product

Ossia Marketing Plan - Hearing Aid Batteries & Starkey Partnership

Using this marketing plan, Ossia, a wireless power technology company, will launch into a new market - hearing aid batteries. By partnering with Starkey Manufacturing, a United States based hearing aid manufacturer, they will be able to capitalize on Starkey’s existing user base and sales team, allowing fast entry into the market. There are four products that are the basis for this plan - a base antenna, expansion antenna, cloud-based management portal, and a wirelessly powered hearing aid battery (using Cota Powered Technology). Starting with a Total Addressable Market of just over 51,000 people (or approximately $4.6 million in potential revenue), Ossia will use a two pronged approach for marketing their new products. One half will be focused on the hearing aid batteries and using an ingredient branding strategy as a joint marketing strategy with Starkey. The other half will look at the Cota platform as a whole, a focus on creating a community and educating potential clients about the technology. This plan projects a positive ROI in year one, with just under a million in profit. By year five, when Ossia will be working with multiple hearing aid manufacturers, the profits are projected to surpass two million dollars

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure: Analysis of HPE’s Decision to Acquire SimpliVity

Team B Project Objectives: Analyze and assess HP Enterprise’s decision to acquire hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) vendor, SimpliVity - Discuss and document acquisition options available to HP - Discuss the reasoning behind why SimpliVity was chosen out of all available options - Define HCI - Consolidating IT components into a single optimized platform with centralized management enables increased utilization and lower costs - Define HCI’s importance both now and for the future of HP Enterprise - Define HP’s current technology portfolio and how it is impacted (positively or negatively) by this acquisition - Define acquisition criteri

Route Optimization using R: Completing the McMenamins Passport

McMenamins is a privately owned chain operating across Oregon and Washington established in 1983. They operate 57 eclectic locations ranging from strip mall locations to fully renovated historical sites. These establishments are pubs, restaurants, historical hotels, movie theaters, concert venues and spas. In 2013 after input from many regulars the McMenamins decided to start a passport program to give back to those already working through their own McMenamins bucket list. This journey takes people from the Southernmost location in Roseburg, Oregon up along the I-5 corridor to the Northernmost location in Mill Creek, Washington. Along the way visiting the 57 locations you must acquire 117 stamps from variations of hidden bars, scavenger hunts and purchase of theater or concert tickets. There are over $200 worth of prizes during the adventure with a grand prize upon completion. The grand prize consists of a 3 night hotel stay, pair of concert tickets, happy hour drink prices Sunday-Thursday for a year, exclusive Tripsters merchandise and an invite to the private Tripsters party. While there is no restriction to complete the passport within a given time we decided it could still be advantageous to optimize the completion of this multi-variable journey. This is a perfect problem to be tackled using R to minimize time of completion of a given transportation route similar to the goal of any distribution center. We wanted to give the user multiple options on how they would like to complete their journey. At first, we wanted to fully map out the entire route for all locations based on a starting location. This was found to be too difficult based on the time variables of locations. Instead we decided to let the user input what they would like based on the following criteria: Starting location (Fixed to PSU) Starting time User Select locations or Google rating Completion time Optimization metho