Assignment two. Read chapter THREE of the text book.

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Assignment 2
The increasing competition across different sectors of the economy around the world calls for the implementation of effective interventional or strategic measures towards maintaining sustainable growth and development of business organizations. Foster Thomas’s work Managing Quality: Integrating the Supply Chain provides valuable insight into some of the ways firms or business organizations can maintain their positions in the highly competitive global economy. As the title suggests, the management of the quality of goods and services produced by a given organization plays a significant role in dictating the firm’s performance across the diverse sectors of the economy. The author, for instance, singles out the importance of managing quality along the supply chain to highlight its importance and influence on the performance of business organizations around the globe. Provided herein is a summary of the book’s chapter 3, Global Supply Chain Quality and International Quality Standards.
The author introduces the chapter by recognizing the fact that the rising rate of globalization or internationalization of business activities by organizations around the globe accounts for an equally increasing number of opportunities. Globalization further accounts for a wide range of challenges to the daily business operations of business organizations including their supply chains. Among the primary concern for global business, entities are the maintenance of quality standards for goods and services offered by these firms. The diversity in quality standards among countries in the global market economy further make it impossible for the firms to maintain their quality standards across the supply chain of their products and services It is the fluctuations in market standards that also accounts for the pricing differences witnessed for products perceived to be of similar brands such as the Fender Stratocaster music guitar. In essence, globalization poses a great challenge to the standardization of the quality of goods and services across the supply chain. It is for such a reason that regional trade areas and countries alike embrace different quality management techniques and approaches to enhance the maintenance of the same as products and services move across the supply chain to the end-users.
The author then goes to address the management of quality for multinational firms or corporations (MNF). Such firms use different market penetration techniques to globalize their business activities including licensing of other entities to sell the products of a given company in a restricted market. Firms can also globalize their activities by forming strategic partnerships with other business organizations that have an advantage in a given sector of the market. The fact that globalization entails shifting of various elements of multinational corporations accounts for a wide range of changes in how it carries out its daily business operations. Globalization, posits the author, affects the physical, social, and task environments of multinational corporations. The shift in the physical environment of a firm’s business operations leads to or rather creates geographical barrie...