Module 3

According to Thomas L. Friedman offshoring is when a company moves one of their factory’s from one country to another to avoid higher taxes, insurance, and overall production costs. Offshoring in my opinion is a win-win for both the company and the country it has moved to.  It is beneficial to the company for obvious reasons of lower costs.  It is also beneficial to the probably less advanced country it moved to because it is giving people from their jobs.  I only say “less advanced country” because I assume if the company is looking for lower expenses that they wouldn’t go to a more advanced country.  Now outsourcing is when you take a small portion of your business and hire another company to do it for you.  An example of this would be maybe something like a call center.  Say the business doesn’t want to deal with the hassle of it, they can hire an another business to do it for them and just pay them a certain fee or percentage per month. In hindsight offshoring is moving business or factory into another country and outsourcing is more like spreading out your business. Both give a lot more people jobs compared to if companies didn’t use offshoring or outsourcing. 

A supply chain in a way is a products life story from the beginning to the end. It is a network of producers, suppliers, distributors, and retailers. It starts off with a simple idea of the product and ends with you buying it. A supply chain makes it so that many companies can work together in the supply chain process by everyone doing their part.  Wal-Mart uses supply chain to their advantage and are very smart about how they use it, in fact companies will compete to be part of Wal-Marts’ supply chain.  Everyone want’s to be a part of it because of the high profits they will get in return, and with many competitors Wal-Mart is able to get the lowest prices from them.  Thats how we get such low prices from Wal-Mart! They are able to keep track of what sells best and where, and when they need more of a product the message heads back down the supply chain.  This is why you almost never see an empty shelf at Wal-Mart, because they are able to keep it continuously restocked.

Google has changed the world forever.  If you have access to the internet then you have access to Google.  Google has all the information and entertainment you could ever search for. Even by just typing in a few keywords into Googles search bar can give you endless pages of information. Google has affected business in many ways.  One way would be Gmail, a free web based e-mail service.  You can have different groups set so you only have to send an email once and not to every individual of the company. With Google+ you can create your own profile and connect with other coworkers and share documents, photos, and other media. The public can also find out a lot about a business by just Googling them.  The business doesn’t even necessarily have to have their own page, Google will bring up anything related to that business. Having a website for your business is a good idea I think.  That way it isn’t information from others, it is information from the business directly.