International business Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words - 8

International business - Essay Example Unilever is regarded as the one of the leading fast moving consumer products suppliers. The business environment of Unilever has been transformed in to a more complex and diverse phenomenon with its independent approach to managing an internationally diverse strategic operational environment, supply chain (logistics) and value chain (www.unilever.com). It owns over 400 world’s popular consumer brands of foods, beverages, personal care and cleaning agents thus offering richness and variety to a global customer base in different countries. Its overall business strategy encompasses a series of other segmental operations. Unilever has adopted a functionality-based approach to its logistic operations, value chain management and decision making in the larger context of corporate expansion, both within the UK market and other regions (Boyle, & Ottensmeyer, 2005). It sells packaged consumer goods to captive consumers who have rarely abandoned the company in preference for another. The logic behind its success is to be found in its mission statement – â€Å"meeting the everyday needs of people everywhere†. Thus out of every two households in the world one uses Unilever products. It controls roughly 90 subsidiaries in the world. It’s the second largest packaged food company in the world just behind Procter & Gamb le (www.unilever.com). Its global network of logistics and value chain has little parallel elsewhere. The current global logistic operations strategy at Unilever is largely determined by its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) strategy, Balanced Score Card (BSC) Framework and Value, Rarity, Inimitability, Organization (VRIO) framework. In ERP the top-down perspective has helped to map out strategic partnerships with a diverse network of suppliers (Jacobs, & Chase, 2010). Thus its ERP techniques have facilitated Unilever’s value chain management functions to a greater extent by doing away with tedious and time