136-199 "The World Is Flat" Offshoring and Modern Business

1)    What is offshoring and how is that different from outsourcing?

Offshoring is when a company moves a department or the whole company outside of its origin.  A typical example is a lot of United States based companies setup their manufacturing in another country such as China.  They do this to save money on the labor and the taxes in many cases.  The difference between this and outsourcing is that it is still apart of your company; you aren’t having another company do the work for your company.

2)    What is a supply chain and how to Wal-Mart use their supply chain to their advantage?

A supply chain is a basically a large distribution of goods, or a sequence of production.  Wal-Mart is a huge corporation; one way that they can do that uses a supply chain to their advantage is always having a location readily available for consumers to come purchase goods.  This is a huge advantage to Wal-Mart, having the physical location for many consumers to go to.  One advantage to that alone is the fact that many other companies use goods from Wal-Mart.  The best example I can give for this is restaurants.  Wal-Mart owns Sam’s Club, which is a place where many restaurants go to purchase groceries, and other commodities such as plates and silverware.  Wal-Mart essentially being convenient for people to go to makes a huge difference in the buying world.

3)    How has Google affected businesses?

Google has both its benefits and downfalls to businesses.  I will start with the upside.  With being so well known and used, if a business can get their name put on Google to come up readily in a search, that brings in a lot of business.  The other benefit is it helps people not go to large corporations and go to the little guy’s cause you can look up whatever good, or service you need and typically you’ll see a little business nearby to you that it’d be nice to support.

Now for a downside, Google brings up businesses close and far, typically if somebody can save a little bit of money buy purchasing online they are going to do it, bypassing a lot of companies for dollars.  It makes the world a much more competitive place when you can literally save hundreds or cents on the same product or service.