Assignment On Consultancy Report For Amazon

Running head: CONSULTANCY REPORT FOR AMAZON
Consultancy Report for Amazon
Name of the Student:
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Introduction
1. Background information about the organization
Size and scope of the organization
In the new era of technical advancement and commercial development, most of the
companies are coming with online product delivery services. Amazon Inc is one of the most
known and competitive companies operating globally. The Amazon.com Inc was founded in the
year of 1994 and now it is employing more than 560,000 worldwide people (Anderson 2018).
The scope of the organization is
“to offer affordable and lower price, best available selective
products and services to their consumers with utmost convenience (Amazon-mission-
statement 2019)”. The current corporate mission of the company is to attract and satisfy the new
as well as retained customer with high level Ecommerce services.
Type of operations
The company offers more than 71 product categories to their customer online and is one
of the largest web retails (List-of-all-amazon-products-and-service 2019). The products and
services Amazon offers to their customers include:
Amazon.com- It is one of the largest internet based retailers in sales and total market
capitalization.
Amazon Books: It is chain of retail online bookstore
Amazon drive: Allows the users to get unlimited backup storage where photos can be
easily shared with quality protection approach.

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Amazon element: The Amazon elements are collection of premium products available
for prime members
The other products and services which Amazon.com offers to their customers include
Amazon echo, fire OS, Fire table, Fire TV, Fire tablet, Fire phone, Amazon Fresh, Amazon
home services as well.
The Amazon.com Inc also offers comprehensive solution in terms of inspire, hub,
Amazon go, kindle, launchpad, mechanical turk, merch, unlimited music etc (Dolata 2017). The
Amazon prime users are allowed to access exclusive TV shows, movies, unlimited photo storage,
free music as well.
Amazon advertisement: Start up business owners can connect their brands and products
with Amazon customers, where they can purchase, share, listen and download also.
Alexa- Alexa is Amazon’s latest voice control system
Business strategy of the organization with sources of competitive advantages
The advanced strategies that Amazon.com follows to conduct a sustained business are as
follows:
Regular entering to new positions and sections: A sophisticated global logistics
represents competitive advantage base for Amazon.
Strengthening the ecosystem: The ecosystem of Amazon.com is comprises of writer,
merchants, app developers, analysts, publishers etc which they are keep on improving by
connecting more numbers of people (Kantor and Streitfeld 2015).

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Focuses on leadership values: The sources of Amazon’s competitive advantage are
contribution of human resources assigned to the company.
Focus on customer services: Amazon.com is much focused on the customer services
and believes in long term success instead of short term success plan.
Brand image, financial strength, international presence, leadership strategies product
distribution and supply, and technology are the sources of competitive advantages to
Amazon.com.
Organizations approach to data analytics
There are huge future scope for the organization to become world’s one of the leading
customer centric companies where the customer will be able to discover any product or service
they wishes to buy online (Todorović et al. 2015). The organization uses qualitative data analysis
approach for gathering and analyzing data.
2. The way Amazon manages and co-ordinates projects
Project management Office (PMO) is a department or team that defines and maintains the
project management activities throughout the business organization. Amazon.com has a PMO
that operates both the internal and external business activities. They are known as the keepers for
project status reporting, best practice adopters and directors as well. The PMO of Amzon.com
gives tangible, long term and repeated business benefits (Martens and Carvalho 2017). The PMO
of Amazon.com is aligned towards advanced corporate strategies. The primary role which is
played by the PMO is helps to support the functional and operational capacities from the project
perspectives.

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Amazon.com uses five specific steps for identifying and prioritizing project as it is the
company’s responsibility to complete a specific project in assigned time and budget (Meredith,
Mantel and Shafer 2017). At first the company prioritizes all the ongoing projects based on
specified project values. After that, the project with maximum amount value is selected and the
team member starts working on the project. After that, urgency and importance of nominate
projects are analyzed. If it is found that, the project is important and complex as well then based
on that projects are prioritized (Persico et al. 2015). The priorities are again categorized in four
forms in terms of- urgent as well as important, not urgent but very important., Urgent but not
much crucial and neither important not important.
The project managers and team members are selected based on their previous
experiences, skills and knowledge. Sometimes teams are formed by taking people from outside.
Sometimes existing employees are assigned to new project (Binder 2016). The recruitment or
selection process followed by the Amazon.com is not different from other organization.
Amazon.com divided their stakeholders in terms of internal and external. Manager,
employees and owners are the internal stakeholders and society, creditors, government,
shareholders, customers and suppliers are the external stakeholders for Amazon (Dolata 2017).
The most important stakeholders for the Ecommerce service offers by Amazon.com are
customers, employees, shareholders, suppliers, distributors, business partners, local community
holders and national government as well as regulatory authority of the organization.
Amazon has incorporated CSR strategies with their business actions. These interests are
much significant for the Ecommerce business (ul Musawir et al. 2017). The company maintains

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open communication for sharing updated information and ideas with rest of the project team
members.
Jeff Bezo uses simple business strategies for easy and quick decision makings. The CEO
of the organization also acts as a leader while taking effective decisions (Smart-decisions 2019).
There are many organizations that use similar decision making stages. Corporate meetings are
arranged to share ideas and information to increase corporate awareness among the project tam
associates. Business decisions are developed considering social, political and economic
influences (Jeff-bezos-simple-strategy 2019). Each company associate takes part in the process
of organizational decision making.
In order to plan and evaluate projects, Amazon uses different tools and techniques.
Survey, observation, case studies, focus group, interviews are the different project evaluation
tools that Amazon uses (Joslin and Müller 2015). Validation, reliability and measurement tools
are used by Amazon for evaluating projects.
Once a project is completed in Amazon.com it is signed off with stakeholder’s signoff.
After that the company considers different post maintenance program. The project manager and
team associates took effective ideas and techniques for evaluating the post maintenance program.
Periodic and timely reviews are conducted by the project team to check whether the project is
running towards the expected direction or not. In this stage the project is finally delivered to the
client (Martens and Carvalho 2017). The steps sequentially maintained to complete the signoff
includes final deliverable handover, process approval and testing, project documentation and
final audit and report presentation.

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In order to implement a project successfully in expected time and cost the HR manager of
Amazon focuses on some aspects. The HR manager focuses on payroll integration which
provides cost effective direction for deposit information. One of the best practices considers by
the Amazon HR manager is labour act or the labour law. It is maintained worldwide to increase
job security awareness program among the working employees (Galloway 2017). The company
provides portals to the employees from where they can retrieve tax forms as well as pay remains.
The action of the HR manager improves business accuracy with automated remainders by
hosting all company related documents. Amazon has low retention HR strategies that need
improvement.
3. The extent to which Amazon uses qualitative and quantitative data for supporting
decision making
The decision making process of Amazon is completely data driven or dependent on data
collected from the employees and regular customers. These days Amazon.com is one of the
globally leading business organizations that offer online services. In order to take effective
company level decision Amazon uses modern qualitative solutions. The advantage of the model
is innumerable and comes quicker in terms of risk reduction, increased production and
satisfactory customer services (Irani 2015). Not only Amazon, most of the companies these days
using the agile process for project development and delivery. Agile method following
organizations is capable to move fast and quicker than the peers and helps in better decision
making.
Qualitative data are used by Amazon.com to informed decision making. Most of the
software organizations use agile method in decision making (Fleming and Koppelman, 2016).
Customer’s feedback plays important role. This method leads an organization in better decision

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making and directs operations to deliver better outcomes. In order to accelerate product
development life cycle and iterate project faster than normal, Amazon uses qualitative research
solutions. Current business environments demand for new decision making approach (Kerzner
2017). Different organizations should think in different ways to operate business functionalities
and operational activities. The decisions making process and other regular applications of
Amazon are different from other similar service providers. However, the organization has not yet
decided to be an agile organization to make high level investment in research progress.
The company is aimed to make intuitive decision making process. The company is
focused on conducting research and testing over the user interfaces before taking decisions. The
company is focused on customer response. Based on responses giving by customers final
decisions are made in Amazon. The high velocity decision making approach follows by
Amazon.com is much beneficial and consist of certain principles. According to Jeff Bezos
decisions must be taken with available 75% of information (Althafairi et al. 2019). It is not
required that each time cent percent information will be available to the decision makers. If
decision makers will wait until 90% information will be available then the company itself will be
late. Amazon like company is capable to manage decisions with 75% of information only.
Amazon uses concept of big data application and cloud for storing huge amount of data.
The company has recently introduced a cashier less grocery store. For delivering effective
services to customers big data tool is used. Amazon has added remote computing services
through Amazon Web services. In order to support the collected data big data is the recent tool
Amazon uses (Hornstein 2015). Some other tools are also offering by big data in storing data,
computing data, collaborating and sharing data whenever required. All these are available in
Amazon cloud. The Amazon elastic MapReduce offers a well managed, user friendly analytical

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platform to the employee so that they can build around the big data Hadoop framework used by
the organization.
The business level decisions are all taken by the steering committee members. Even for
delivering, shipping products the company has taken similar approach like Uber. These
approaches are helping Amazon.com to increase their annual revenue and commercial global
growth (Jeff-bezos-simple-strategy 2019). Amazon.com is making commercial investment for
their research and development department to take needful decisions. The customer journey
mapping is very effective in Amazon’s decision making.
4. Recommendations
In order to enable Amazon towards effective project management and decision making it
has to focus on various IT operations. In order to improve the future scope of Amazon.com some
recommendations are elaborated:
Improving marketing success strategies: Amazon.com needs to focus on their existing
marketing strategies to engage customers and increase customer loyalty (Galloway 2017).
Though, Amazon is known for its customer focused services but in order to make the customer
journey Amazon should focus on some additional aspects. The existing market program of the
company must be improved.
Implementation of email marketing: Amazon.com needs to improve email marketing
by increasing email channels. Different kinds of marketing and transactional processes should be
considered by Amazon to improve their current marketing approaches.

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Improving security: While delivering any personalized products Amazon must focus on
security (Papke-Shields and Boyer-Wright 2017). High security will make sure that no unwanted
users are enabling to extract data from the server without permission or authentication.
Improvement in the recommendation algorithm: The mobile streaming highlights
most of those products on which customers are interested. It recommends similar types of
products and gives over thousand of options to the customers to select the best one among those
(de Carvalho, Patah and de Souza Bido 2015). However, in some cases it is found that, the
streaming algorithm uses by Amazon.com is not strong enough. Therefore, the developers of the
organization need to improve their recommendation algorithm for resolving theses identifies
risks or challenges.
Cross checking reviews and ratings: The reviews and ratings giving by customers for
each product must be considered by the working associates. Though the reviews and rating
platform of Amazon is very strong but still it requires additional attention of the customers.
Customers, who send email to know product reviews, must get timely response (Marchewka
2016). The email marketers of the organization should create messages with key specific subject
lines. The subject line will only ask the customers about the products they are purchasing online.
Avoiding fake reviews: Due to fake reviews sometime wrong product related
information generates which requires to be avoided. The review checking platform of
Amazon.com is required to be improved for commercial growth and business profit. It will help
to bring big market changes.

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Improvement of the business model: The current business model of Amazon needs to
be improved. Based n the corporate mission and vision statement the business model has to be
modified. In fact the company needs to focus on continuous improvement approach.
Avoidance of cyber crime: These days, cyber criminals are exploiting personal and
financial data of the customers. These data are needed to be secured from the unwanted and
unauthorized users.
Selection of best suited ecommerce model: Among different existing business model
the company needs to adopt the most suitable model for conducting the business.
Security process improvement: The current security aspects such as encryption,
application firewall are needed to be improved. As mush it will improve no external user would
be able to enter to the system and extract data from the storage and misuse those (Kerzner 2017).
Additionally, DMZ also needs to be implemented to tighten the technical security.
Conclusion
The above discussion concludes that, the business strategy follows by Amazon.com can
be described as a cost leadership that has been taken to an extreme level. The organization has
combined business scale economics, innovative business processes and business diversification
to operate the online service successfully. Focus to competitors, invention, operational
excellence and long-term commercial thinking are the principles that guides the competitive
advantages and business strategies. Apart from that, the organization is focused on variable
convenience, price and product selection. The main focus of this company is to offer lower price
selective products to their consumers. The company wishes to get a global reach with a wider

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product selection and customer centric business approach. The supply network and distribution
chain of Amazon.com is stronger than any other online service providers. The company has
opened many centers with large network aids worldwide and managed distribution offered by the
company is the major reasons for global competitive advantages for
Due to advanced business opportunities and global competitive advantages the customer
based on Amazon is rapidly growing. The company keeps on making investment for further
technical and business improvement. They are making continuous investment for developing
their own products and services. In sufficient time the company has become a global business
empire.

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