STRATEGIC POSITIONING

The consumer landscape continues to shift. Digital trends combined with mobility continue to reshape the world. And they continue to reshape the relationship that consumers have with their friends, with their families, with the products that they actually use, they're more connected, and also with the brands they actually connect with, said Trevor Edwards, Vice President of Global Brand and categories for NIKE at Jun-28 Fiscal 2011 results presentation event. Trevor continues to say, At NIKE, we stay relentlessly focused on the consumer. And for us, that consumer is an 18- year old who lives a fast paced, socially connected life enabled by technology. They live an on demand world with information and services at their fingertips. And they get what they want, how they want it, when they want it. They're squarely in charge. So, how does NIKE capture the imagination of the consumer today? Well, they do this by focusing their business on the consumer so that NIKE can understand their needs, their aspirations and their desires. NIKE created the category offense, which is really about dedicated business units that are focused on the consumer, from design to marketing to product creation to sales and to retail. And the intent there is to make sure that they have a team that really understands everything about the consumer. It allows NIKE to relentlessly evolve and focus their business around the changing consumer needs so that they can know them better, and can out-innovate their competitors. And most importantly, NIKE can serve the consumer authentically in sport and in life.By understanding the consumer better than anyone else, NIKE innovates by actually bringing them new and better products, new and better services, or new and better experiences. Even things consumer can't yet imagine. And NIKE continues to redefine the relationship between NIKE and today's consumer. It's deeper; it's stronger than ever before. And it informs how NIKE innovates across their entire business. NIKE reaches to maximum number of people through strong brand endorsement.

Executive Summary

Need
The purpose of this project is to study PERT, an operations management technique. PERT is of extensive use in the process of scheduling, planning, coordinating and managing projects. It helps managers, reduce the time and cost of projects, thus increasing organizational efficiency. It has applications across all sectors and fields.

What is PERT? (Program Evaluation and Review Technique)

Program (Project) Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT)(G) is a project management tool used to schedule, organize, and coordinate tasks within a project. It is basically a method to analyze the tasks involved in completing a given project, especially the time needed to complete each task, and to identify the minimum time needed to complete the total project.

PERT Terminology
Since PERT is fairly technical, it deals with a lot of terminologies such as activity, event, precedence relationship, network, slack, path, critical path, earliest start time, earliest finish time, Dummy etc. These terms are further explained in the project.

Steps involved in PERT planning

Define project and all tasks Develop task relationships or sequences Draw a network connecting tasks Assign time estimates Compute the critical path Use the network to plan, monitor and control

Advantages of PERT
1. It helps in ascertaining the time schedule of activities having sequential relationship. 2. It makes control easier for the management. 3. It identifies the most critical elements in the project. Thus, the management is kept alert and prepared to pay due attention to the critical activities of the project. 4. It makes better and detailed planning possible.

Disadvantages of PERT
1.There can be potentially hundreds or thousands of activities and individual dependency relationships 2.PERT is not easily scalable for smaller projects 3.The lack of a timeframe on most PERT/CPM charts makes it harder to show status although colours can help (e.g., specific colour for completed nodes) 4.When the PERT/CPM charts become unwieldy, they are no longer used to manage the project.

Difference between PERT and CPM

Though the terms PERT and CPM are used interchangeably, they are fundamentally different. PERT is a probabilistic tool whereas CPM is deterministic tool. PERT is used for one-time activities like Research while CPM is used to monitor routine activities.

Case Study
The project uses case studies that explain the implementation of PERT in the manufacturing, health and agricultural sectors. They provide an insight into the multiple implementations of PERT across the field.

Conclusion
Since, PERT has certain limitations; its usage should be combined with that of certain other operations management techniques to get the best and most accurate results. However, it should be noted that PERT is an excellent approach to manage and monitor projects, leading to greater efficiency and productivity.