OPER1027 Group project - 2022-23 “Green Cars”

Green Cars is a company you and your group will be setting up. The company will operate a mixture of internet based activities and customer facing activities. You will need to identify suppliers of equipment, develop a supply chain, design your operations including logistics and transport, warehousing, managing your installation teams etc. Installation may be outsourced to qualified contractors.

Green Cars sources, imports, sells and installs Electric Car Charging Points. You propose to set up a website to drive sales of Electric Car Charging kits and of packaged services to your customers in a location of your choice (UK or other country). The services you initially plan to offer are importing: Electric Car Charging Points, control panels (with apps for mobile phones to control and report on performance if you can source them), batteries (Lithium ion and lead/acid) and inverters, cables, mounting frames and fixings. Batteries may be needed for large commercial operations with limited capacity on the electrical supply. The batteries can be charged up 24 hours per day and used to charge large commercial vehicles at night as there may be insufficient capacity on the power supply to fully charge a fleet of heavy commercial vehicles. You can sell these kits to DIY customers and also provide a fitting service to those unwilling/unable to do it themselves.

Your target market could be any or all of the following and any others you feel are appropriate.

1. National Government
2. Local government
3. Community groups/organisations/housing associations etc.
4. Commercial organisations – transport/logistics companies, public transport (e.g. bus) supermarkets, carpark owners etc.
5. Private individuals/Taxi drivers etc.

In the future you may offer other products (such as; if the buyer has a large enough roof or other suitable area, you may also provide solar panels to recharge the vehicle “off grid”.) but for now you will focus on the core activities of supplying and fitting electric Car Charging points.

What will be needed will be an Operations Plan.

The operations plan will include the following:

1. The overall operations strategy - how do you recommend the council operate, (High quality, low cost or what?)

2. Process design including defining the network of supplier types

3. The location of the facility(s) to be built

4. The capacity planning of the facility (current capacity needs and future expansion requirements)

 5. Inventory management strategies

6. Forecasting and demand management strategies (you may need to research this and suggest possible options as to how you will monitor and improve your forecasting and demand planning)

7. Budgeting and Costing

8. Logistics and transport

9. Quality issues and quality improvement

10. Risk management and risk mitigation strategies

11. Sustainability issues of the whole value chain

12. Business ethics/CSR this may include traceability/provenance of products

13. International Market entry strategies - look at the impact of trying to expand your services to your near neighbours in the region and other parts of the world such as USA, Japan and other developed economies.

*The weighting refers to the proportion of the overall module result that each assessment task accounts for.

Your assessment brief:

Coursework 1 Individual Assignment 70% 3,000 words marked by tutor

A) Conduct a detailed analysis of one of the sections listed below in the Groupwork Assignment Brief (Sections 1-13) analysing the decisions you made and the academic justification for the decisions (approximately 1,500 words). You will need at least four (4) good quality references to support this. Good quality references are from academic journals and textbooks. Please list these in a separate References section marked “Academic References” Supporting references e.g. photographs, data from non-peer reviewed sources etc. should be under “References”

B) Write a reflective report (of approximately 1,500 words) showing what you have learned so far this year from creating the operations plan for your group project and from the tutorials. You can use your reflective blog as a guide. You should also list SMART goals to help you as an individual and a group to complete the group assignment on time and on quality.

A reflective report should describe what you did (individually and as a group), what you felt you did well (individually and as a group), what you felt you did not do so well (individually and as a group) and an action plan to improve yourself (SMART goals). This needs, as a minimum, two good quality references one on reflective report writing and one on group working. You may use any reflective cycle theories but Gibb’s (1988) or Kolb’s (1987) may be a good foundation.

Evidence of your contribution to the group work to support your statements must be provided. The evidence may be in the form of examples of your contribution to the plan (cut from the report), your electronic conversations (emails, WhatsApp or other may also be used to support your contributions)

Coursework 2 Group coursework 30% 6,000 + words marked by tutor

The outline operations plan should be 6,000 + words and be contributed to by each member of the group.

The plan should be built up in MS Word or Google Docs or other similar software package and each member of the group must contribute their own content and modify other's content to ensure a good workable consistent plan is produced.

The plan should look at the following aspects:

1.            The overall operations strategy

2.            Process design including the network of suppliers (to meet your new expanded needs. Remember you are going to try to bring the operation into the 21st century.

3.            The location of the facility(s) to be built (if you plan to build a new one)

4.            The capacity planning of the facility (current capacity needs and future expansion requirements)

5.            Inventory management strategies

6.            Forecasting and demand management strategies (you may need to liaise with the sales and marketing dept. for this)

7.            Budgeting/cost implications of different options e.g. fixed vs. variable costs, capital, labour, transport etc.

8.            Logistics and transport

9.            Quality issues and quality improvement

10.         Risk management and risk mitigation strategies

11.         Sustainability issues of the whole value chain

12.         Business ethics/CSR this may include traceability/provenance of the product/materials used

13.         International Market entry strategies - look at the impact of trying to sell your services to your near neighbours in the region (Europe) and other parts of the works such as the developed economies of Japan and USA.

Each section should outline a number of options based on academic theory and critically analyse these leading to your recommendation explaining why the alternatives were rejected (supported by academic literature and properly referenced in the Harvard style).

Formative Assessment

There will be a formative assessment on week commencing 20/2/2023. Each group will be expected to present a PowerPoint outline of their group’s progress to date in the tutorial, and answer questions on why they chose the actions they did. The tutor and students will give their feedback and suggestions to the group.

Feedback

Each assignment will be marked by your tutor and feedback will be provided specific to your assignment. The module leader will also add an overview of the feedback in the lecture following assignment 1 mark release.

13.1.      Undergraduate rubric template (numerical scale) can be found in Moodle

Important note: Coursework is marked on the understanding that it is the student’s own work on the module and that it has not, in whole or part, been presented elsewhere for assessment. Where material has been used from other sources, this must be properly acknowledged in accordance with the University’s Regulations regarding Academic Misconduct.

Marking, feedback and next steps

To pass this module, students must achieve an overall mark of 40+ for the combined assessments. 

For coursework, the marks and feedback will normally be provided to students within fifteen working days of the submission deadline. In exceptional circumstances, where there is a delay in providing feedback, you will be informed by the module leader. 

If you do not pass a module at the first attempt, you may be eligible for a resit opportunity on the failed assessments. This will be confirmed after the Progression and Award Board (PAB). Note that marks on resit assessments are capped at 40% unless extenuation has been applied for and granted.

For further details on resit assessments, please see section 7 below. 

The assessment and feedback policy can be accessed at Assessment and Feedback Policy