The Success of Carrefour Hypermarkets

The Success of Carrefour Hypermarkets Case Background Carrefour is the world largest foodstuff retail chains in volume sales; the hypermarkets have their head office at Levallois-Perret, France; Lars Olofsson and  Amaury de Sà ¨ze opened the company’s first branch on June 3, 1957 at Annecy, France.Advertising We will write a custom essay sample on The Success of Carrefour Hypermarkets specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More To remain competitive in the fast changing and competitive retail industry, the company ensures it has established its outlets in strategic locations and has an appealing internal design/layout to facilitate fast shopping and create good impression to its customers (Carrefour Official Website). This paper discusses Carrefour’s location and design strategies. Location To ensure that the company gets to its target customers effectively, it is located in places of high population; areas that they expect to have a large customer base. The company offers fresh products thus, they need to be close to the consumers as possible. The locations include in shopping malls, shopping centres, airports and in emerging towns, depending with the location, the products that the company stocks varies. For example, the company sells fast foods at airports in their kitchen section. In every chain, the company ensures that there is ample parking that customers can use when shopping, the locations are also accessible when using public means and when having a personal means of transport. The location of the hypermarkets offers a pleasant experience to customers, they feel their needs are catered for within any chain; this helps in creating customer loyalty and confidence with a hypermarket (Carrefour Official Website) Internal design and the effect on customers The company offers more than 3,000 non-food items; some of these items include cosmetics, furniture, electronics, office equipments, and kitchenwares. To ensure that customers are able to get products in a shopping mall, the company has created a pleasant and easy to follow internal design; it has divided the malls into sections offering similar goods and they are well label. For example, vegetables are found in the same section, electronic and kitchenware in the same section. When a customer is not able to trace a commodity, the staffs are willing and ready to assist, they are well versed with the structure and the way the chain of supermarkets have been arranged, this assists in easy guidance inside the chain.Advertising Looking for essay on business economics? Let's see if we can help you! Get your first paper with 15% OFF Learn More It is a policy that all companies operating under the name of Carrefour has the same arrangement strategy; this strategy assists international consumers be able to buy from any chain of the company. To effectively manage the multibillion stores, the company manages an orchestrate team. For an effective oper ation, Carrefour requires an optimal combination of physical and human resources. Well-trained and experienced work force is the greatest asset that an organization can have; it is through human resources that an organisation exists. The company ensures that there is good customer service offered by the staffs at all level; staffs are expected to have high morale and good mastery of the chain of markets and how they are planned. In case a customer feels that he/she want shopping guide, the company is willing to offer some. There are good shopping trolleys that have engine in case someone needs (Fred 12-56). Conclusion The success of Carrefour hypermarkets can be attributed to its strategic locations and quality customer service. The company has appearing internal designs where products of the same categories are placed in the same segment to facilitate fast shopping. Carrefour Official Website. Carrefour UAE. 2011.Web. Fred, David. Strategic Management: Concepts and Cases. New Jers ey: Pearson Education, 2008.Print.Advertising We will write a custom essay sample on The Success of Carrefour Hypermarkets specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More

Biography of Philip Emeagwali, Computer Pioneer

Biography of Philip Emeagwali, Computer Pioneer Philip Emeagwali (born August 23, 1954) is a Nigerian-American computer scientist. He achieved distributed computing breakthroughs that helped lead to the development of the internet. His work with simultaneous calculations on connected microprocessors earned him a Gordon Bell Prize, considered the Nobel Prize of computing. Fast Facts: Philip Emeagwali Occupation: Computer scientistBorn: August 23, 1954 in Akure, NigeriaSpouse: Dale BrownChild: Ijeoma EmeagwaliKey Achievement: 1989 Gordon Bell Prize from the Institute of Electronics and Electrical EngineersNotable Quote: My focus is not on solving natures deeper mysteries. It is on using natures deeper mysteries to solve important societal problems. Early Life in Africa Born in Akure, a village in Nigeria, Philip Emeagwali was the oldest in a family of nine children. His family and neighbors considered him a prodigy because of his skills as a math student. His father spent a significant amount of time nurturing his sons education. By the time Emeagwali reached high school, his facility with numbers had earned him the nickname Calculus. Fifteen months after Emeagwalis high school education began, the Nigerian Civil War broke out, and his family, part of the Nigerian Igbo tribe, fled to the eastern part of the country. He found himself drafted into the army of the seceding state Biafra. Emeagwalis family lived in a refugee camp until the war ended in 1970. More than half a million of Biafrans died of starvation during the Nigerian Civil War. The Philip Emeagwali Family in 1962. Wikimedia Commons / Creative Commons 4.0 After the war ended, Philip Emeagwali doggedly continued to pursue his education. He attended school in Onitsha, Nigeria, and walked two hours to and from school each day. Unfortunately, he had to drop out due to financial problems. After continuing to study, he passed a high school equivalency exam administered by the University of London in 1973. The education efforts paid off when Emeagwali earned a scholarship to attend college in the U.S. College Education Philip Emeagwali traveled to the U.S. in 1974 to attend Oregon State University. Upon arrival, in the course of one week, he used a telephone, visited a library, and saw a computer for the first time. He earned his degree in mathematics in 1977. Later, he attended George Washington University to earn a Masters degree in Ocean and Marine Engineering. He also holds a second Masters from the University of Maryland in applied mathematics. While attending the University of Michigan on a doctoral fellowship in the 1980s, Emeagwali began work on a project to use computers to help identify untapped underground oil reservoirs. He grew up in Nigeria, an oil-rich country, and he was someone who both understood computers and how to drill for oil. Conflict over control of oil production was one of the critical causes of the Nigerian Civil War. Computing Achievements Initially, Philip Emeagwali worked on the oil discovery problem using a supercomputer. However, he decided it was more efficient to use thousands of widely distributed microprocessors to do his calculations instead of tying up eight expensive supercomputers. He discovered an unused computer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory formerly used to simulate nuclear explosions. It was dubbed the Connection Machine. Emeagwali began hooking up over 60,000 microprocessors. Ultimately, the Connection Machine, programmed remotely from Emeagwalis apartment in Ann Arbor, Michigan, ran more than 3.1 billion calculations per second and correctly identified the amount of oil in a simulated reservoir. The computing speed was faster than that achieved by a Cray supercomputer. Wikimedia Commons / Creative Commons 4.0 Describing his inspiration for the breakthrough, Emeagwali said that he remembered observing bees in nature. He saw their way of working together and communicating with each other was inherently more efficient than trying to accomplish tasks separately. He wanted to make computers emulate the construction and operation of a beehives honeycomb. Philip Emeagwalis primary achievement wasnt about oil. He demonstrated a practical and inexpensive way to allow computers to speak with each other and collaborate all around the world. The key to his achievement was programming each microprocessor to talk with six other neighboring microprocessors at the same time. The discovery ultimately helped lead toward the development of the internet. Legacy Emeagwalis work earned him the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers Gordon Bell Prize in 1989, considered the Nobel Prize of computing. He continues to work on computing problems, including models to describe and predict the weather, and has earned more than one hundred honors for his breakthrough achievements. Emeagwali is one of the most prominent African-American inventors of the 20th century.