SCM30001 Transportation Management - Assignment 2: Team Report on Transportation Planning

Assignment details:

The task

You will be asked to form into teams of three or four in 5.5 Discussion 2: Forming teams for Assignment 2. Once you know who you will be working with for this assignment, this discussion will also require you complete a team charter.

As a team, you can select a company that is involved in the mining activity of Western Australia. This will help you to collect more information about the nature of the business and achieve a better understanding on how the industry operates and what are the unique challenges they face in terms of managing their transportation needs.

Research and prepare a group report as set out in the Report structure section. You can use the Group Discussion Board in Canvas to post progress reports.

NOTE: You will individually submit a copy of your team report, and all members will receive the same grade for each of the criteria, with the exception of the self and peer evaluation component. Therefore, when you are ready to submit, complete your individual Self and peer evaluation form (DOC 60 KB) Download Self and peer evaluation form (DOC 60 KB). Attach the evaluation form as the last page of your personal submission of the team report.

Report structure

Although you are free in structuring your report, it is suggested to include the following sections, and respond to each appropriately.

Once you have completed your Team charter (DOC 60 KB) Download Team charter (DOC 60 KB)you can use it to decide how you will allocate responsibilities for writing the report and word counts among the sections.

Include the following sections and respond to each prompt:

• Executive summary(very brief).
• Table of contents(not included in word count).
• Introduction:
  • Provide the necessary introductory information to assist the readers with understanding your report.
• Background:
  • Undertake an analysis of the position of your selected company in the relevant industry. To enable a more structured and detailed discussion, you may want to use a macro-environmental analysis (PEST) and industry analysis (Porter's Five Forces), or any other relevant framework. As part of your response, discuss how these macro factors and the industry analysis may impact on the proposed import activity. This analysis must be relevant to the scope and context of this assignment.
• Current status of transportation management:
  • Explain the current transportation practice (such as modes of transportation, handling equipment and units) used by the industry for such type of work, including why.
  • If data is available, explain how the company currently manages its transportation, including upstream (suppliers) and downstream (customers), and why. For example, do they manage functions in house, or do they use third-party logistics?
• Recommendations:
  • Provide a sound transportation plan for importing the mining equipment from Peru to Australia. Your transportation plan must provide the reasoning behind transportation decisions, giving a balanced justification for the basis of decisions. The plan must include the network design, regulatory consideration (customs for example) and costing.
  • Recommend how recent innovative technologies can play a role in the effective management of transportation in your selected company.
  • How the existing regulations around import of goods to Australia will impact your decision? Should this be seen as a threat to the recent purchase of the equipment?
  • Reflecting on your answers to the previous questions, discuss the transportation risks and challenges that your selected company is facing. Ensure that these risk and challenges are directly linked to the issues that you have raised in your report. In addition, include a brief discussion on how you would manage these risks that would mitigate the impact on the operations of your selected company.
  • With all of your recommendations, justify the reasoning behind your decisions, using relevant professional and scholarly literature.
• Conclusion:
  • You must incorporate your key learning points and concluding remarks.
• References:
  • These should be in the the Swinburne HarvardLinks to an external site.referencing style with a minimum of 8 different academic sources included. Marks will not be awarded for the use of non-academic sources such as Wikipedia/websites etc.
• Appendices and/or list of acronyms if needed(optional; not included in word count).