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This thesis paper aimed to compare the marketing of wine in Germany and France. Though Germany and France are neighboring European countries, they are culturally, politically, socially, economically, geographically, and technologically different. These differences, directly and indirectly, affect the way both countries do business.
Three research questions helped to compare wine marketing in Germany and France. These questions are the following:
Factors that go into the wine production as well as certain indicators or characteristics inform the potential customers about the quality of the wine they have in their glasses. That is why the first question in this thesis focused on how the quality of wine is defined in Germany and France.
Wine Associations at different layers: regional, national, European, and international play an important role in wine promotion. So, the second re-search question was to investigate the contribution of these different wine co-operatives in wine marketing.
To market their wine, many countries put in place different marketing strategies to increase their wine image and customer base. That is why the Last part of this paper was to compare the different marketing strategies used in the wine sector in Germany and France.
This thesis ended up with a conclusion.
Global collaborations are becoming increasingly relevant in product projects. Therefore it is necessary to understand the different project management approaches on how global projects are carried out and what the differences are.
This bachelor thesis is a review of two project management manuals, which were designed by the company itself, on how project management at an internationally operating commercial vehicle manufacturer works with the focus being on time and risk management.
The aim of this thesis is to give recommended actions which improve the project steering, collaboration and the general approach in regards of time and risk management.
To achieve this goal a review of both project management manuals as well as expert interviews were carried out. Qualitative expert interviews were conducted with German- and English-speaking colleagues from different plant locations all around the world. Specifically, 12 questions included background knowledge and project work knowledge and were related to the two manuals, with the focus being on time and risk. The interviewees were required to be actively involved in at least one project and therefore have project work experience and thus are using one of the own project management manuals.
The answers of the interviews, as well as the current manuals contribute to the findings and based on the findings, it is recommended to create an example project for training purposes, to create a list of projects in order to divide the work, to use sprints or detailed planning, to focus on five top risks, to create a social intranet page dedicated to project management and to create a clear meeting plan in advance.
Aktionsplan Mikroplastik
(2022)
An average investor trying to allocate his wealth among multiple assets ideally has nearly infinite possibilities to do so. However, asset allocation strategies try to facilitate this process. Nevertheless, no consensus exists on which strategy is ideal and yields the best performance. Therefore, this paper aims to determine an ideal asset allocation strategy for an average investor by comparing two asset allocation strategies.
The focus is on comparing the practical application of Markowitz’s Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), a sophisticated asset allocation strategy, with an equally weighted asset allocation, namely the 1/N strategy. The past performance of these two strategies is compared with the help of a calculation example based on historical data. The quantitative analysis covers three time periods of different lengths between 1991 and 2022. Also, the strategies are applied to portfolios with different amounts of assets during these periods. Although the existing literature is very controversial concerning the performance of the two strategies, this research shows a clear result. Compared to the 1/N strategy, this study’s findings show an outperformance of the MPT strategy during every period and each portfolio combination. However, the difference in performance regarding return and risk is minimal in most scenarios and would not significantly affect an average investor who invests over a long-term horizon.
The present thesis performs an actuarial work that intends to understand the premiums, expenses, and claims, including the reserves considered the most important technical variables in an insurance company. The company is located in Colombia and the work will be performed in 2 branches: Compliance and Liability.
The objective of the thesis has been set as to define and measure a claim ratio after remarking a lack of an indicator that describes the 3 most important technical variables altogether in the company. It has also defined to assess the current methodology that calculates the reserves for the claims occurred but currently unknown by the insurance company under the premise that there is a very low level of observed claims in the history of the company in both branches.
All the methodologies defined, assessed, and performed in this thesis have been compared to other methodologies implemented in journals, research papers and articles to align the conclusions and take the best practices from actuarial works previously done. They all also considered to keep homogeneous results that was considered as a very important achievement even by other sources.
A new methodology has been defined to calculate expenses related to administration, the ones used in the reserves and the ones related to claims. The new expenses level was used in 2021 and an impact of a tremendous increase in premiums was observed the same year as a reaction of the decrease in policy prices.
The conclusions derived from the work was to continue with the current methodology to calculate the incurred but not reported claims reserve according to the instability seen in the Chain-Ladder methodology until more homogeneous result could be seen that yield to a higher level of credibility.
Finally, among many possible claim ratios defined, a paid claim ratio has been considered. It includes the whole variables inside the premiums of the company and the most important variables inside the claims that were the claims paid and the proportional and non-proportional reinsurance effect.
Die Verfolgung einer klaren Transferstrategie kann laut mehreren Studien den sportlichen und wirtschaftlichen Output eines Fußballklubs erhöhen. In dieser Arbeit sollen die relevanten Faktoren für die Entwicklung und Verfolgung solcher Transferstrategien herausgearbeitet werden. Hierfür wird das Thema durch den Literaturteil in den Gesamtkontext des Profifußballbereichs eingebettet, wobei verschiedene Aspekte wie zum Beispiel die Kommerzialisierung des Fußballs oder der Ablauf des Transferprozesses betrachtet werden. Danach werden im empirischen Teil die Durchführung und Ergebnisse von neun Interviews mit Experten aus dem Bereich der Kaderplanung dargestellt. Die Interpretation und Diskussion der Ergebnisse sowie der Vergleich mit der Literatur zeigen, dass Alter, Entwicklungsstand und Kosten eines Spielers für strategische Transferentscheidungen relevant sind. Entscheidend ist außerdem die Ausrichtung der Strategie nach den Zielsetzungen und Rahmenbedingungen des Vereins. Zu beachten ist schließlich, dass eine klare Definition der Strategie zwar sinnvoll ist, eine flexible Anpassung an externe und interne Veränderung dabei aber gewährleistet bleiben muss.
This paper analyses five different Cryptocurrencies, namely Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Dogecoin and Litecoin, and studies their impact on traditional financial portfolios under different allocation strategies. The allocation strategies under consideration in this paper are the modern portfolio theory according to Markowitz, an extension of it such as the tangency portfolio, and the equally weighted portfolio. Further, this study explores the effect on the efficient frontier when Cryptocurrencies are added to the efficient portfolios. In addition to that, the paper aims to examine whether the mean – variance portfolio optimization according to Markowitz outperforms the naïve and tangency portfolio strategy. The portfolio performance is evaluated based on the Sharpe ratio. The quantitative analysis of this paper covers the time period from 2017 to 2022, in total five years. In accordance with the existing literature on portfolio optimization with Cryptocurrencies, the study reveals that besides some issues related with Cryptocurrencies such as cybercrime and a lack of regulations, Cryptocurrencies can be beneficial for portfolio diversification with traditional financial assets. Referring to the portfolio strategies, the study highlights that the optimal mean – variance portfolio and tangency portfolio do not differ significantly in terms of Sharpe ratio. However, both strategies outperform equally weighted portfolios.
The following study examines the influence selected variables have on the price of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin by utilizing a multiple linear regression model. Data of 267 observations for each variable during a five-year period from 13 August 2016 to 1 October 2021 are analyzed. The results present empirical evidence on the relationship of Bitcoin and external determinants such as traditional financial assets, in particular the stock market, the bond market, domestic currencies, the real estate market, gold, and the popularity of Bitcoin, represented by a Google Trends analysis. The findings imply that only the stock market and the real estate market proxies significantly influence the price of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.
The paper tests the German stock market for excess volatility and stock price overvaluation with regard to the simple efficient markets model and the cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio. Long-term historical stock market data of 49 years are used to calculate the detrended real price and ex-post value and data of 39 years to compute the cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio, both from the sample of two German automotive stocks. The empirical evidence provided by the analysis points to excess market volatility and confirms the theory of overvalued stocks, which is linked to the bubble theory. This indicates that price fluctuations cannot be justified only by changes in fundamental values as claimed by the Efficient Market Hypothesis. The German stock market therefore shows inefficiency.
The insurance industry in Germany has been dominated by a commission-based sales model for over seventy years. Intermediaries sell insurance contracts to end customers and are paid a commission depending on the value and type of insurance. This commission-based approach incentivizes salespeople to keep adding new policies to customers in order to make a living, and customers do not get the insurance solutions and advice that suit them the best. A financial services provider has now developed a novel business model that aims to disrupt the insurance industry in Germany. It replaces commission-based insurance with commission-free tariffs and instead includes a flat fee for managing the client's insurance policies. However, the business idea can only be realized profitably if the administrative expense per client is significantly reduced. Due to strict regulations in the insurance industry, many activities within the process are mandatory.
The goal of this work is to automate the business process behind the idea through the use of digital technologies and to reduce the workload in order to make the business model profitable. We used design thinking as a mental framework to carry out the digital transformation of the business model in a structured way. As part of this qualitative research, we conducted expert interviews and a document structure analysis to define hurdles for the realization and to develop detailed process maps. We carried out a process workshop, during which we analyzed the process and identified requirements for a digital prototype, which was developed using the low-code framework bubble.io.
Through workload time measurements, the impact of digital transformation on the performance of the process was confirmed. Finally, different digital options were compared with each other. The findings of this work support the thesis that design thinking has a positive influence on the success of digital transformation and in particular in the development of solutions tailored to people. This success is underlined by a reduction in workload times by 71,2% for bottleneck activities. The comparison of the various digital options implies that the development of customized digital applications is preferable for unique and complex problems.
International agierende Unternehmen müssen sich im Tagesgeschäft immer häufiger
mit dem Entsendemanagement auseinandersetzen. Diese Arbeit stellt die steuer- sowie sozialversicherungsrechtlichen Anforderungen dar, welche im Rahmen der Vorbereitung einer Mitarbeiterentsendung aufkommen und als große Herausforderung gelten, da verschiedene Rechtsgrundlagen in Betracht gezogen werden
müssen. Zudem besteht in allen Ländern eine Meldepflicht, welche auf dem jeweiligen
nationalen Recht basiert. Auf Grundlage dieser Rechtsvorschriften werden Ansätze vorgestellt, um den Entsendeprozess so effizient wie möglich zu gestalten und um entstehende Risiken bei Nichterfüllung der Voraussetzungen zu minimieren. Eine standardisierte Abwicklung und Auslagerung von Teilprozessen im unternehmensinternen Entsendeprozess können zur Reduzierung des administrativen Aufwandes
beitragen sowie einen Überblick über alle Teilbereiche geben. Dabei hilft eine transparente Kommunikation, um Missverständnisse bei Entsandten zu vermeiden.
Diese Arbeit will erforschen, inwiefern die Position eines Arbeitnehmers in der Automobilindustrie entlang der Wertschöpfungskette Einfluss auf dessen Jobzufriedenheit hat. Dabei folgt diese Arbeit einem explorativen Ansatz. Zur Beantwortung der Forschungsfrage stellt diese Arbeit die Grundlagen der Wertschöpfungskettentheorie nach Porter sowie einschlägige Modelle der Forschung zu Arbeitszufriedenheit vor. Es wurde eine Studie durchgeführt, welche der in der qualitativen Sozialforschung verwendeten Grounded Theory Methodologie folgt. Die Interviewteilnehmer wurden so ausgewählt, dass ein analytischer Vergleich ihrer Aussagen Aufschluss über die Forschungsfrage bringen könnte. Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, die wichtigsten Faktoren der Arbeitszufriedenheit herauszuarbeiten und sie in Bezug zu der Position eines Arbeiters der Automobilindustrie entlang der Wertkette zu setzen. Es gilt herauszufinden,ob es bei Arbeitern in der Automobilindustrie einen kausalen Zusammenhang zwischen Unterschieden in deren Arbeitszufriedenheit und der Position ihrer Tätigkeit entlang der Wertkette gibt. Sind manche Arbeiter zufrieden mit ihrer Arbeit, weil sie auf einer bestimmten Position entlang der Wertkette, wie zum Beispiel der Technologieentwicklung, arbeiten? Lassen sich Trends erkennen nach welchen gewisse Positionen entlang der Wertkette ein höheres Maß an Arbeitszufriedenheit aufweisen oder hängt die Berufszufriedenheit gänzlich von anderen Faktoren ab? Auf die vorhergehenden Fragen soll diese Arbeit anhand einer nachvollziehbaren Datenerhebung, Auswertung und Analyse Antworten liefern. In Abhängigkeit dessen, wie sich die Forschungsfrage beantworten lässt, könnten sich neue Impulse für die Erforschung der Arbeitszufriedenheit ergeben und diese um eine weitere Dimension ergänzen.
Artificial First Responder
(2022)
Artificial Intelligence is becoming an increasingly important part of everyday life and is considered a matter of course by many people. Since it can be assumed that artificial intelligence will play an increasingly central role in business in the future, this paper aims to investigate the intersection between AI and Digital Sales Technologies through a systematic literature review. This thesis identified 32 relevant articles through an extensive literature search in the databases Web of Science, ScienceDirect, and SpringerLink. Through the detailed analysis of these 32 articles, the following four topic clusters could be identified: “Application Layer, Social Layer, Challenges, and Futuristic Layer”. Based on these layers, the developed research questions were answered successfully, and the following conclusions were drawn: AI is already being used in Digital Sales Technologies in numerous ways, for instance through voice assistants like Alexa. In addition, various changes for consumers and salespeople were identified, that accompany the adoption of AI in Digital Sales Technologies. Furthermore, this thesis provides an answer to which challenges this integration brings and how AI will influence Digital Sales Technologies in the future. Finally, research gaps for future research are identified based on the collected findings from the literature review.
By researching the influence of heuristics and biases on investment decisions and performance of investors in the exchange, this paper contributes to the field of behavioral finance. The paper adopts a generalized perspective on investors and markets in the exchange and provides insights into investors’ decision-making behavior that challenge the traditional assumption of perfectly rational market agents. Thus, it presents statistically significant evidence that investors may not resemble the concept of perfect rationality, as they use heuristics and comply with the prospect theory in investment decisions. Therefore, these decisions are shaped by systematic errors known as biases. The paper’s focus comprises the heuristics of availability, representativeness and anchoring and adjustment as well as the prospect theory. These psychological concepts are investigated for their impact on investment decisions and for subsequent effects on investors’ performances. The investment performance, for this purpose, is measured by investors’ returns. In addition, these psychological elements are studied comparatively to detect interrelations between them and to identify differences in the magnitude with which they influence investment decisions of distinct groups of investors. The paper involves an analysis of quantitative primary data collected by an international survey. Thus, a sample of 297 investors with different characteristics is analyzed. Although the study reveals that investors in the exchange behave according to the considered psychological elements in their investment decisions without differences between groups, it does not show that this entails performance-inhibiting consequences. However, a negative relationship between the investors’ age and their compliance with these elements is found.
In the quickly developing industry landscape of the organic food market, keeping pace with consumer demands and market growth can be a challenge. Organizations with long histories in the organic market, such as dairy supply cooperatives are facing difficulty to maintain their competitive advantage. These cooperative organizations are unique compared to traditional firms in their committed responsibility to multi-stakeholder value creation and protection as defining measures of successful operations.
The paper investigates what factors and principles could be implemented by a cooperative to establish a consumer retail brand in the organic food market. It also examines the effects of this strategic marketing decision on the relationship between, and outcomes for, several of their stakeholder groups. To balance between narrowing the variables and context, while still providing relevant findings on a national scale, a French organic dairy coop serves as a qualitative case study. In addition, a pool of expert semi-structured interviews was conducted, obtaining real time information applicable to the current case study situation.
The findings supported the development of a consumer retail brand to enhance competitive position in the French organic food market. Beyond organizational competitiveness, these results conclude that a retail brand presence for the cooperative could return synergistic additional value to the cooperative stakeholders, including the business, members and their social and biological environments. Finally, the outcome suggests a reciprocal, reinforcing relationship between a corporate brand strategy and the mission of the organic dairy cooperative case study subject. These findings are partially transferable to other organic cooperatives and add a cooperative organizational perspective to the brand strategy and development academic work.
Cryptocurrencies are becoming increasingly popular as an investment object due to the underlying promising blockchain technology, a growing number of use cases and especially because of their recent enormous price increases. As a young and emerging asset class, cryptocurrencies also face investors with several challenges and uncertainties.
This thesis investigates the impact of adding cryptocurrencies to diversified portfolios and whether cryptocurrencies can be a reasonable portfolio addition for investors. For this purpose, based on Harry Markowitz's Portfolio Selection Theory, a statistical analysis of portfolios with and without cryptocurrencies and different degrees of diversification was conducted for a 5-year-period. The portfolios were analysed in terms of return, risk and correlations and the efficient portfolio allocations as well as efficient frontiers were determined for different return and risk scenarios, both with and without the use of short sales.
The results of the statistical analysis showed that cryptocurrencies have significantly higher returns but also higher levels of volatility and risk than traditional asset classes. Although cryptocurrencies show less strong positive correlations with other traditional assets, they nevertheless correlate positively with the representatives of the traditional asset classes examined, which is why cryptocurrencies are only suitable to a limited extent as a means of risk diversification. Cryptocurrencies can be an attractive portfolio diversification but only for investors who are willing to accept higher risks for higher returns as the addition of cryptocurrencies significantly increases both the return potential and the risk of portfolios. Therefore, the higher an investor's expected portfolio returns and risk appetite, the higher should be the portion of cryptocurrencies in his portfolio.
Year after year, global warming, and plastic output increase, and massive volumes of carbon dioxide (CO2) are being released into the atmosphere. Even though humans are aware of their environmental impact, they do struggle to change their behavior. But what is the reason for this?
The purpose of this thesis is to illuminate the factors that make it difficult for people to demonstrate pro-environmental behavior (PEB) and to form ideas from the field of nudging to assist in guiding humans to a better PEB. As a result, a meta-analysis was created from a multitude of papers on the issues of PEB and nudging. The proposals presented in this work serve as an impetus for future studies in the field of PEB nudging.
This thesis addresses the relationship between sustainability action and firm competitiveness. Through the analysis of literature and by conducting a survey on consumer demands and preferences, the question whether sustainability action can help companies in the consumer electronics sector gain a competitive advantage is answered.
This thesis comes to the conclusion, that sustainability action can yield many advantages for companies, when executed properly. In general, companies with a strong sustainability performance reduce their production cost, have easier access to capital and labor, show financial and stock performance on the same level or higher than less sustainable companies, reduce stakeholder risk and gain consumer goodwill which can materialize into a competitive advantage. Regarding the consumer electronics sector,
this thesis shows that most consumers would prefer more sustainable products over less sustainable ones and would be willing to pay a price premium. What seems to be a big issue in the consumer electronics market is, that even though companies like Apple already act on the issue of sustainability, they are either doing a bad job or having a hard
time communicating their sustainability initiatives to consumers.
Abstract
The large-scale impact of the climate change on all regions and industries of the world underlines the need for action in the logistics sector. Despite literature in this field has matured fast since the last 5 years, it neglects the consideration of digital tools or measures to introduce sustainability in the sector. Consequently, precise recommendations on how to manage digital disruptions in order to reach sustainability goals in Logistics are lacking.
The objective of this thesis is to develop those recommendations and to facilitate their implementation for practitioners in the truck container transportation sector. To do so, the impact as well as the evolution of digitalization must be determined. Besides, factors for managing digital change successfully and measuring their impact in this sector shall be ascertained. Finally, a holistic framework to support the implementation process for becoming more sustainable by using digitalization should be presented.
A single-case study at the Logistics Start-Up “driveMybox” intends to fill the identified gap in knowledge. Particularly, it is studied how the organization manages to use digital tools to offer CO2-neutral truck container transports on their platform. Thereby, the different approaches are being looked at. Besides, data is gathered through qualitative interviews and other internal documents.
The first outcome of the thesis is an overview that illustrates the role of digitalization in Logistics. It increases the awareness of the digital impact and helps practitioners to take useful actions. Furthermore, a clear set of success factors to forward sustainability in the transportation sector was developed. Finally, a holistic result depicts which steps can lead to a more sustainable transportation process. Summarising, the thesis contributes to extant literature by combining digitalization with approaches to sustainability. The given recommendations consider the particularities of Start-Ups and support practitioners in this field with valuable guidelines and a holistic framework.
The goal of the following paper is to examine if Corporate Architecture can be used as a tool for Employer Branding, as both concepts gained of importance over the last years, due to the war for talents. Therefore, specific aspects of each of the theories are focused on. The focus of Corporate Architecture lies on the interior design of offices, specifically in combination with the color association theory. This theory states, that colors are associated with specific values, things or emotions. The focus of Employer Branding is set on the values of cohesion and agility, as those are key characteristics of innovative teams and organizations.
Durch die negativen Auswirkungen der Produktion und des Konsums von herkömmlichem Fleisch auf Umwelt und Gesundheit entsteht eine zunehmende Nachfrage nach Alternativprodukten. Die vorliegende Bachelorarbeit beschäftigt sich mit diesen Alternativen zu Fleisch und beantwortet die Forschungsfrage: Welche Chancen und Risiken bestehen für Unternehmen im Markt für pflanzliche Fleischalternativen und In-vitro-Fleisch? Dazu werden die Erkenntnisse aus der aktuellen wissenschaftlichen Literatur zu diesen Themenbereichen dargestellt und hinsichtlich der Forschungsfrage kritisch analysiert. Die Analyse der Literatur zeigt, dass der Markt für Fleischalternativen weiteres Wachstumspotential und wirtschaftlichen Chancen für Unternehmen bietet, dort jedoch auch forschungs- und produktionstechnische sowie rechtliche Risiken bestehen und die Akzeptanz dieser Produkte in der Bevölkerung noch zu gering ausfällt. Unternehmen müssen deshalb weiter an ihren Produkten forschen. Zukünftig sollten weitere Forschungsarbeiten beispielsweise den Wasser- und Energiebedarf von In-vitro-Fleisch genauer untersuchen, um festzustellen, ob dieses wirklich weniger negative Auswirkungen auf das Ökosystem der Erde hat als herkömmliches Fleisch und ob es deshalb als umweltfreundliche Fleischalternative vermarktet und wirtschaftlich produziert werden kann.
The goal of this bachelor thesis is to find out if Lidl is well prepared for the future challenges in the retail sector. Change management plays an important role, as implementing new aspects into a business requires change. As change management is a well-covered topic, the goal was to understand how change management works and what kind of problems might come up in theory. By interviewing experts within Lidl, it was aimed to find out where Lidl is positioned compared to the competition and what potential plans are ahead but also what kinds of challenges Lidl as a company is facing. It shows that implementing change requires good shareholder management, communication but also understanding the market to know which change makes sense or not. At the end the goal is to define risks and to assess if Lidl is well positioned to maintain the success.
As prerequisite to final graduation of my master in international business management MBA at Business School, Hochschule Furtwangen University, I conducted this Thesis but also as a practical business case that match with the nature of my master’s focus of international business and could be used in real life.
I put myself as a member of project’s managing team for a pharmaceutical company, this team as a part of strategic decision-making process is responsible about assessing different potential international markets and segments as a part of the company plan to expand their operations, tape and penetrate new markets.
Narrowing down the options to two geographic markets (Germany & Saudi Arabia) and two pharmaceutical segments (Diabetes& OTC), starting this assessment with macro analysis (PESTEL) of Germany and Saudi Arabia followed by micro analysis (Porter’s five forces) of the pharmaceutical industry in the two markets of concern, having more in depth review of the two potential segments in each individual market then head to head attractiveness comparative analysis of the two potential segments in the two potential countries showing the pros and cons for each of the potential available opportunities and finally reach a conclusion to solve this business scenario.
In order to satisfy both scientific research basis and business need I utilized Data from both peer reviewed articles, reports from highly trusted international institutions and organizations for their data accuracy and few theoretical books.
Limitation of this paper: taking in consideration that some relevant data i.e., regarding specific market profitability are not accessible due to either company’s confidential policies or data consolidation for example the financial statements of Bayer, the pharmaceutical company shows consolidated data combining Europe and middle east allowing no possibility(for outsider) to directly compare profitability of each specific country, here in our research Germany and Saudi Arabia, also I tried my best to use the most recent accessible data , but some of the most updated relevant data is out of my reach either due to confidentiality or it is paid data that requires funding resources not available in my case as I am doing this Thesis independently not in partnership with a company, these limitations might to some degree affect the precision of the final conclusion.
Comparison of Visual Attention Networks for Semantic Image Segmentation in Reminiscence Therapy
(2022)
Due to the steadily increasing age of the entire population, the number of dementia patients is steadily growing. Reminiscence therapy is an important aspect of dementia care. It is crucial to include this area in digitization as well. Modern Reminiscence sessions consist of digital media content specifically tailored to a patient’s biographical needs. To enable an automatic selection of this content, the use of Visual Attention Networks for Semantic Image Segmentation is evaluated in this work. A detailed comparison of various Neural Networks is shown, evaluated by Metric for Evaluation of Translation with Explicit Ordering (METEOR) in addition to Billingual Evaluation Study (BLEU) Score. The most promising Visual Attention Network consists of a Xception Network as Encoder and a Gated Recurrent Unit Network as Decoder.
This master´s thesis focuses on the development of a competitor analysis process as a proposal for the business unit “Power and Energy Solutions”. As a new business approach for the Marquardt Group in the fast-growing and trending electromobility market, it is essential to develop a process to optimize the identification and assessment of competitors in order to obtain relevant information needed to build competitive advantages and plan business strategy.
This study highlights the essential information to be collected on competitors as well as the importance and benefits of conducting an analysis. A proper competitive analysis consists of considering and understanding certain external aspects surrounding the competitor. The structure of the industry, the company's current position, the customers and suppliers are key factors that have to be considered in order to conduct a successful competitive analysis. In addition, this thesis shows the steps and the main elements to contemplate in order to successfully perform a process within the company.
A qualitative research methodology has been applied for this thesis, in which literature review has been conducted and expert opinions and experiences have been included. The information has been collected through primary and secondary sources, with the aim of understanding the current situation of the business unit and obtaining relevant literature on the topic from reliable and accurate sources. Moreover, action research has been carried out in order to link theory and practice to provide a solution.
This master's thesis offers a proposal for the competitor analysis process, outlining seven stages to be followed. They have been established as a result of the evaluation and integration of the literature review and the current situation of the business. In addition, a conceptual framework has been designed as a concentration and visual representation of the best practices and methods to provide structure and support each stage of the process.
The implementation and constant utilization of the process will allow the development of a standardized system that ensures effective analysis in the business context. Moreover, it will provide a comprehensive analysis of competitors and their surroundings, as well as improvements and transparency in collaboration and practices within the company. Consequently, it will ensure a positive impact on the business unit for decision making and building competitive advantages.
Conception and development of a corporate website strategy on the example of KARL STORZ SE & Co. KG
(2022)
In recent years, digitalization has caused an increasing transformation of the entire business world towards a digitalized economy. The Covid-19 pandemic has rapidly accelerated this ongoing digital transformation. Therefore, online presence is also becoming increasingly important for companies to survive in the digital economy. KARL STORZ SE & Co. KG, a traditional medium-sized company firmly focused on face-to-face sales, was strongly affected by the limitations of the pandemic. Switching to digital alternatives, especially the corporate website, stands out as the most critical digital cross point.
This bachelor thesis uses a marketing strategy model to analyze and research the position of KARL STORZ SE & Co. KG in the market and explores the functions and characteristics that a corporate website must have to meet today’s customer, stakeholder, and employee needs.
First, this work intends to offer an overall understanding of digitalization and its impact on the medical technology industry and medium-sized companies. Secondly, the corporate website characteristics are considered. The third theoretical part includes the analysis of two digital marketing strategy models, which are compared with each other. Finally, the company KARL STORZ SE & Co. KG and its website are presented, and a strategy model for developing a website strategy for the business year 2023 and beyond is applied.
Interviews conducted with internal and external experts on websites provide valuable information and a deeper understanding of the importance of a website in the digital environment.
In the end, this paper gives recommendations for actions for website development.