BUS30009 Industry Consulting Project Assignment Help
Capstone 2: Rotary Club of Hawthorn – Coffee Cup Project
Introduction and Background
The Hawthorn Rotary Coffee Cup Project is offered as a project for BUS30009: Industry Consulting Project students. A 5-6-member multi-disciplinary team will be required to work on this genuine live problem-solving project. A coach with relevant expertise will be needed to facilitate the project. This document provides both general and specific information to guide the work of the student group.
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Organizational Background Information
The specific organisation with which the students will be working on this project is the Rotary Club of Hawthorn (RCH). RCH is a member of Rotary International (RI); an organisation comprised of 33,000 Rotary Clubs with 1.2 million members across 200 countries worldwide. Working within a framework established by RI, the governance and operation of each club are independent, although clubs regularly work together on local and international projects and engage in training and social activities in small and large groups. To facilitate order within such an enormous global organisation, Rotary is divided into 34 geographical Zones and each Zone is divided into Districts. There are 529 Districts in total with 21 Districts in Australia. RCH is one of 64 clubs in our District (District 9800) and one of 8 Rotary clubs in the municipality of Boroondara. The RCH was established 65 years ago. It was the tenth Rotary Club in Victoria and the first in Boroondara. Rotary was founded in 1905 in Chicago USA to facilitate networking between leading businessmen* and professionals, but it has grown into a complex multifaceted organisation of business, professional, and community leaders promoting integrity, and advancing world understanding, goodwill, and peace through its fellowship and service work across the globe. (*Note that Rotary has for several decades been open to women. Indeed, recently in developed countries the increase in membership has been greater for women than men and women are taking on more and more of the leadership roles.)
Rotary has six main humanitarian causes:
- Provide clean water, sanitation, and hygiene
- Fight disease
- Save mothers and children
- Support education
- Grow local economies
- Promote world peace
The funding of work in each of these key areas comes from fundraising input at club level and from philanthropic donations to the Rotary Foundation. The Foundation has now grown to a pool of about one billion US dollars, and has, over the history of Rotary, contributed more than three US billion dollars to humanitarian service projects around the world. The current signature project of Rotary International is the elimination from the world of the debilitating and often fatal disease poliomyelitis. The efforts of Rotary have reduced the number of cases of polio in the world each year from hundreds of thousands to less than 30. Total elimination of the disease is within sight. The Rotary Foundation is recognised as amongst the most ethical and well-run charitable foundations in the world. Every dollar Rotary raises for charity work goes to charity. Funds to run the organisation come from membership fees. Funds raised by Rotary clubs go to local, national or international community projects. In the past year, the RCH has contributed towards environmental, educational, vocational, health and welfare projects in the Boroondara area, to health projects for indigenous communities in central and North-western Australia, to educational and water/sanitation projects in Timor-Leste and the Philippines and to medical projects in Cambodia. Funds raised by clubs for humanitarian work may be supplemented with grants from the Rotary Foundation. Among the many other facets of Rotary, and integral to the RCH, are business networking, personal and professional development, and friendship that arise from the meetings and business of the Club. The Club meets weekly for lunch at the Kooyong Tennis Centre and once a month in the evening at the Vision Australia offices, also in Kooyong. Members are free to attend as few or as many meetings as they wish.
Project Drivers
To facilitate the humanitarian work of the Club, it is necessary to continually raise funds. In recent years, RCH has raised funds from a range of activities including fees collected for parking cars at sporting and community events, from a biannual open garden event, from selling traditional Christmas food (hams, cakes and puddings) and from ad hoc special functions. There has been a steady decline in the income from each of these fundraising activities and there is a risk that this income will continue to decline in the future. To sustain RCH’s charitable and humanitarian work into the future, alternative fundraising strategies must be found. The proposed Coffee Cup project, if implemented, has the potential to be an important fundraising initiative for the Club.
Project Proposal for Capstone
The problem RCH would like Swinburne students to address relates to assessing the feasibility of this project, including its likely fundraising potential. If it is assessed as feasible, then to develop a business and marketing plan for the project. Specifically, RCH would like the students to address the following questions:
- Is there a market for quality recyclable coffee cups?
- Where is this market?
- How could the product be most effectively promoted?
- What is the potential to grow the market?
- Would it be feasible for the Club to handle sales directly or to use distributors? E.g. coffee shops.
- Is it likely to be economically and practically viable as a fundraiser for RCH?
- What is the potential fundraising income over a twelve-month period?
- What processes and resources would be needed to establish and maintain the project?
For example
o Is there a reliable supplier?
o What stock levels should be maintained?
o What initial funding would be needed?
o What margins could we expect?
o What is the sequence of steps involved in establishing the project?
o What are the setup costs?
o What ongoing costs would be involved?
o What are the ongoing processes e.g. purchasing, storage, receipt and processing of orders, distribution, other sales options, packaging, posting, volunteer hours needed?
Constraints
a. The current membership of the RCH is aging and their time and capacity for physical work are decreasing. We hope through membership raising efforts to redress this constraint, but the time new younger members may have could also be limited. Rosters can be constructed to spread the load.
b. The project will require seed money. Obtaining this money will be a challenge and may rely on loans or donations from members who already give a lot of money to Rotary. The maximum amount that could be raised $15K – $18K.
c. Limited storage is available currently, but this cannot be guaranteed beyond a year or two.
d. Identifying the right volunteer, the Club member to be the Project Leader.
e. Rotary International places constraints on the use of the Rotary logo. Permission will need to be obtained and there is strict control over the appearance of the logo.
f. It would not be feasible to extend the project beyond Australia.
