Background Information about Amazon Company
Amazon Company was launched in 1994 by Jeff Bezos. Its headquarters are situated in Seattle, Washington. Jeff chose to locate Amazon Company in Seattle since it had an adequate pool of technical talent. Again, Seattle was near to the largest to one of the largest book wholesalers situated at Oregon. The name of the company was primarily chosen. At first, it started with an alphabet since it has some association with the largest South American River (Kristensen et al., 2017). The Company began as an online bookstore. Later on, the company diversified and added several other items. In 1999, Amazon Company emerged as a winner because of its success in making online shopping popular across the worlds.
Amazon’s Products and Services
Amazon Company offers a set of products that are cloud-based. Some of its products include databases, networking, mobile, management tools, and several enterprise applications. The company also sells other products such as books, movies, housewares, toys, and electronics to millions of its customers. It services are web-based. Amazon offers web services such as data renting, computing resources also called cloud computing as well as data storage. It also provides other services such as database offering, publishing, advertising, and digital content subscriptions.
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More so, Amazon Company is known as the leading kindle-book readers in the market. Its aspect of promoting such devices has led to rapid growth in e-book publishing and hence turning the company into a major book publishing organization in the market. Amazon, through its subsidiary on the whole food market, it provides organic and health foods across its stores. It also offers a variety of wholesale products such as whole trade bananas, organic eggs, and organic ground beef, among many others.
The company allows its customers an opportunity to access its websites through mobile applications. Also, Amazon Company provides an Amazon prime. Amazon Prime is a yearly membership program that allows customers to have unlimited and instant streaming to as many movies and music as possible. It also offers plans that enable sellers to promote and grow their businesses. Sellers can sell their products in Amazon's websites together with their branded sites.
Amazon’s Markets
Amazon is emerging as the biggest online retailers across the world by having global sales of about $89 in last year. The company proceeds to expand in foreign markets such as in China. For the previous two years, the Amazon's sales have grown nearly by 25% in North America (Mariia, 2017). The international sales are over 38% of the top line which is down slightly from 40% in other previous years. Other key markets for Amazon Company include Germany which emerged as the third largest Amazon market in 2014. Surprisingly, Japan is now the fourth largest Amazon market and not China as pointed earlier. Germany, China, and Japan account for over 85% of international sales.
Amazon company takes almost 50% of e-commerce in the U.S. its sales in this year are staggering at around $258.2 billion. In 2017, the company captured close to 44% of the market (Kristensen et al., 2017). The company targets to make double sales to the marketplace by the end of this year. However, a few days ago, Amazon erased close to $68.1 billion after it lost its wall street's revenue expectations. The Company plunged 7.8% on its final day of trading which marks the worst stocks day since 2014. Currently, Amazon's market cap is approximated to be $803.28 billion (Mariia, 2017). The statistics suggest that Bezos himself lost over $11 billion in the process.
Supply Chain Strategies
Amazon Company uses NextGen supply chain as its key supply strategy. The approach offers both flexible and effective services to the company and its potential customers. Usually, it is data -driven. It means, the company needs to collect as many data as possible to bring an insight that can influence the supply of Amazon's products and services effectively. The strategy is aimed at tracking all company's products by locating where they are in a faster way.
NextGen supply chain allows the company to optimize the supply of its products on informed analysis. Again, it makes it quite easier to improve and monitor the performance of the company (Brooker, 2018). More so, the strategy is capable of reacting to drastic environmental changes of the company. For example, NextGen supply chain responds to unpredictable incidents such as natural disasters in an appropriate manner that suits the performance of the company (Brooker, 2018). It means, by using NextGen supply chain, Amazon company can thrive in all types of environments whether challenging or competitive.
The Use Drones in Supply Chain
The use of drones to supplement the NextGen supply chain would have a lot of benefits to the Amazon Incorporation. Drones are the unmanned aerial vehicles that are used for supply purposes in many companies. Amazon uses drones to physically move their materials and products from one center to another (Bamburry, 2015). The latest observation asserts that drones are moving Amazon's inventories to different areas as directed by Amazon's managers. More so, they are moving small products in a faster way and hence reducing the urge of demanding for forklifts. Outside the Amazon's warehouses, drones are used as a strategy for supply chain deliveries. In general, drones in a supply chain helps Amazon Company to obtain raw materials from various sources.
Multi-Year Planning Horizon as a Recommended Improvement Project
The recommended improvement project for Amazon Company is a multi-year planning horizon. The multi-year planning horizon is a plan that gives the amount of time a company should consider in the future when creating a strategic plan. For example, it would be appropriate for Amazon Company to use a five-year planning horizon for its success purpose (Nara et al., 2016). It helps the company to organize and plan for the material requirements. Additionally, a multi-year planning horizon creates a commitment to all client company. It strives to cater customer's needs and make them their partner over multiple years.
Current Freight Flows, And Future Freight Flows after Implementation of Multi-Year Planning
Implementation and execution of multi-planning horizon have both presents, and future freight flows on Transportation Improvement Plan (TIP). For the current freight flows, the transportation of products from one point to another is faster (Zmud et al., 2017). There are fewer cases of delays and inefficiencies in the supply of the products, and hence it is creating positive impacts of distance to the markets on business.
On the other hand, in future freight will improve such that intraregional bilateral exports of products will grow. Forecasting on future shipment will strive to match infrastructure supply for demands and assessment investments. Therefore, the structure of exchanging goods will improve in the future. The project will enhance the growth rates of commodities since it will focus on future capacity problems.
Conclusion
Amazon Company is among the leading organization in the world at present. Right from its historical background, it shows that Amazon Company is much determined to meet the needs of the customers. Its products are quite appealing and attractive to many consumers. More so, the services it provides to people are termed to be excellent and more extraordinary. NextGen supply chain plays a significant role in the success of Amazon Company. The strategy gives the company an insight that influences an adequate supply of Amazon's products and services.
References
Bamburry, D. (2015). Drones: Designed for product delivery. Design Management Review, 26(1), 40-48.
Brooker, P. (2018). SESAR and NextGen: investing in new paradigms. The Journal of Navigation, 61(2), 195-208.
Kristensen, M., Penner, J., Nguyen, A., Moy, J., & Lam, S. (2017). Company Synopsis for Amazon. Com, Inc.
Mariia, K. (2017). The impact of intangible assets on the market value of international companies.
Nara, K., Satoh, T., Aoki, K., & Kitagawa, M. (2016). Multi-year expansion planning for distribution systems. IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 6(3), 952-958.
Zmud, J., Lee-Gosselin, M., Munizaga, M., & Carrasco, J. A. (Eds.). (2017). Transport survey methods: Best practice for decision making. Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
