Question

You are the purchasing manager for a large jewelry manufacturer. The company’s president sent you abroad to find new suppliers of base metals, including brass, copper, nickel, and aluminum. You were asked to evaluate each supplier based on the quality, availability, and cost of its products. You have just returned from a 12-day trip to suppliers in Cambodia, China, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates. You will present your findings and recommendations to the company’s senior executives, but you’re not sure how best to organize your speech.

• Your major choices are chronological order, problem-solution order, and topical order. What might be the main points of your speech with each of these methods of organization? Explain which method you think would be most effective for your presentation.

Answer 1

The best way to organize a speech would be as follows:

Initial few slides on a short description, history of each supplier.

We will also highlight our findings in the trip i.e.e what each supplier has notions about us.

Next we determine the most important aspects of the supplier; i.e whether quality or cost or availability is the most important criterion for the manufacturer. Accordingly we will rank each of these aspects. Few slides on these aspects with proper reasoning.

For instance, take for example Availability is the most important factor for the manufacturer. So it is ranked 1. Next can be the quality and it will b ranked 2 and cost ranked 3.

Against each of these aspects we will rank each supplier. Detailed analysis of each supplier with respect to Availability and ranking. Similarly detailed analysis of each supplier basis quality and cost. So an overall ranking of each supplier is produced.

Now we can decide basis the least ranking which supplier the manufacturer should work with. This is a mathematical and scientific way to determine which suppliers to work with.