Challenges MNCs Face in Emerging Markets: The Nestlé Experience

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-231
Author(s):  
V.S. Pai

Maggi was the most popular instant noodles brand in India, which children in particular loved to snack on. The brand had a dominant position until suddenly in mid-2015 it got engulfed in controversy. Several state food regulators found that Maggi contained monosodium glutamate as well as lead well above the prescribed limits. Both these substances were harmful especially for children. When Nestlé India was confronted with lab test results it stuck to its position that they had a world class quality control process in place and that their products were safe for consumption. Finally, the national food regulator FSSAI, ordered a ban on the sale of Maggi including product recall. Consequently, several state governments imposed temporary ban on the sale of Maggi noodles in their respective states. The future of the company suddenly looked very bleak. Nestlé India was slow to respond to this fast unfolding crisis. Further, their responses were very brief and not adequately culture-sensitive. This led to the feeling in several quarters that the company was probably guilty of wrongdoing. To set right things Nestlé's worldwide CEO flew into India to douse the flames of the controversy and draw up an appropriate strategy to bail out the brand. He address the media, put in place a new CEO for Nestlé India and set brand Maggi on the path of recovery. However, Nestlé India was still facing a number of critical issues. What should be done to win over the trust of its customers? How should it recover market share lost to competitors both old rivals and new entrants? What strategy should it develop to succeed with the new products, especially hot heads, launched along with the comeback strategy? Should it change its approach to dealing with government health officials to prevent confrontations in future? How should it shorten the response time and make it effective in the face of a media backed public outcry in future?

Author(s):  
Chris Forster

Modernist literature is inextricable from the history of obscenity. The trials of such figures as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall loom large in accounts of twentieth-century literature. Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity reveals the ways that debates about obscenity and literature were shaped by changes in the history of media. The emergence of film, photography, and new printing technologies shaped how “literary value” was understood, altering how obscenity was defined and which texts were considered obscene. Filthy Material rereads the history of modernist obscenity to discover the role played by technological media in debates about obscenity. The shift from the intense censorship of the early twentieth century to the effective “end of obscenity” for literature at the middle of the century was not simply a product of cultural liberalization but also of a changing media ecology. Filthy Material brings together media theory and archival research to offer a fresh account of modernist obscenity with novel readings of works of modernist literature. It sheds new light on figures at the center of modernism’s obscenity trials (such as Joyce and Lawrence), demonstrates the relevance of the discourse of obscenity to understanding figures not typically associated with obscenity debates (such as T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis), and introduces new figures to our account of modernism (such as Norah James and Jack Kahane). It reveals how modernist obscenity reflected a contest over the literary in the face of new media technologies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-117
Author(s):  
Christian Henrich-Franke

Abstract The second half of the 20th century is commonly considered to be a time in which German companies lost their innovative strength, while promising new technologies presented an enormous potential for innovation in the US. The fact that German companies were quite successful in the production of medium data technology and had considerable influence on the development of electronic data processing was neglected by business and media historians alike until now. The article analyses the Siemag Feinmechanische Werke (Eiserfeld) as one of the most important producers of the predecessors to said medium data technologies in the 1950s and 1960s. Two transformation processes regarding the media – from mechanic to semiconductor and from semiconductor to all-electronic technology – are highlighted in particular. It poses the question of how and why a middling family enterprise such as Siemag was able to rise to being the leading provider for medium data processing office computers despite lacking expertise in the field of electrical engineering while also facing difficult location conditions. The article shows that Siemag successfully turned from its roots in heavy industry towards the production of innovative high technology devices. This development stems from the company’s strategic decisions. As long as their products were not mass-produced, a medium-sized family business like Siemag could hold its own on the market through clever decision-making which relied on flexible specialization, targeted license and patent cooperation as well as innovative products, even in the face of adverse conditions. Only in the second half of the 1960s, as profit margins dropped due to increasing sales figures and office machines had finally transformed into office computers, Siemag was forced to enter cooperation with Philips in order to broaden its spectrum and merge the production site in Eiserfeld into a larger business complex.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Song Gang ◽  
Wang Xiaoming ◽  
Wu Junfeng ◽  
Li Shufang ◽  
Liu Zhuowen ◽  
...  

In view of the production quality management of filter rods in the manufacturing and execution process of cigarette enterprises, this paper analyzes the necessity of implementing the manufacturing execution system (MES) in the production process of filter rods. In this paper, the filter rod quality system of cigarette enterprise based on MES is fully studied, and the constructive information management system demand analysis, cigarette quality control process, system function module design, implementation and test effect are given. This paper utilizes the Fuzzy analytic hierarchy process to find the optimal system for processing the manufacturing of cigarette. The implementation of MSE based filter rod quality information management system for a cigarette enterprise ensures the quality control in the cigarette production process. Through visualization, real-time and dynamic way, the information management of cigarette production is completed, which greatly improves the quality of cigarette enterprise manufacturing process.


Cell ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 184 (11) ◽  
pp. 2896-2910.e13
Author(s):  
Haifeng Jiao ◽  
Dong Jiang ◽  
Xiaoyu Hu ◽  
Wanqing Du ◽  
Liangliang Ji ◽  
...  

2014 ◽  
Vol 652 (1) ◽  
pp. 206-221
Author(s):  
Anton Harber

Two decades of contestation over the nature and extent of transformation in the South African news media have left a sector different in substantive ways from the apartheid inheritance but still patchy in its capacity to fill the democratic ideal. Change came fast to a newly open broadcasting sector, but has faltered in recent years, particularly in a public broadcaster troubled by political interference and poor management. The potential of online media to provide much greater media access has been hindered by the cost of bandwidth. Community media has grown but struggled to survive financially. Print media has been aggressive in investigative exposé, but financial cutbacks have damaged routine daily coverage. In the face of this, the government has turned its attention to the print sector, demanding greater—but vaguely defined—transformation and threatened legislation. This has met strong resistance.


2013 ◽  
Vol 141 (2) ◽  
pp. 798-808 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhifang Xu ◽  
Yi Wang ◽  
Guangzhou Fan

Abstract The relatively smooth terrain embedded in the numerical model creates an elevation difference against the actual terrain, which in turn makes the quality control of 2-m temperature difficult when forecast or analysis fields are utilized in the process. In this paper, a two-stage quality control method is proposed to address the quality control of 2-m temperature, using biweight means and a progressive EOF analysis. The study is made to improve the quality control of the observed 2-m temperature collected by China and its neighboring areas, based on the 6-h T639 analysis from December 2009 to February 2010. Results show that the proposed two-stage quality control method can secure the needed quality control better, compared with a regular EOF quality control process. The new method is, in particular, able to remove the data that are dotted with consecutive errors but showing small fluctuations. Meanwhile, compared with the lapse rate of temperature method, the biweight mean method is able to remove the systematic bias generated by the model. It turns out that such methods make the distributions of observation increments (the difference between observation and background) more Gaussian-like, which ensures the data quality after the quality control.


2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serdar H. Yönak ◽  
David R. Dowling

Abstract Leak testing is a critical manufacturing quality control process. Unintended leaks in pressurized or evacuated containers may be detrimental to consumers, manufacturers, and/or the environment. This paper describes a leak detection and localization technique based on photoacoustic sounds produced by scanning a carbon dioxide laser over leaks emitting a photoactive tracer gas, sulfur hexaflouride. Photoacoustic signals are recorded in a bandwidth from 3 up to 110 kHz by multiple microphones. From these recorded signals, the presence or absence of a leak may be deduced by comparison with background noise levels. When a leak is present, its location is determined from a simple model of the acoustic environment and matched field processing (MFP). Current results show that a gas leak of 1 cm3 per day can be detected and localized to within ±1 mm in a few seconds using four microphones placed 0.41 m from the leak location and an incoherent average of the MFP ambiguity surfaces at twelve signal frequencies.


2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-44
Author(s):  
Karol Grochalski ◽  
Katarzyna Peta

Abstract Article presents the methods of detecting defects within material with the use of active infrared thermovision. During the study ABS and PVC samples were used inside which internal structure defects and defects of glue conjunction between components were modeled. During combining composite materials with the use of glue joints, there is a problem with homogenous distribution of the glue layer on the surface of an element, which results in the creation of defects in joint structure and the decline of active surface of adhesion forces on the combined materials. It is then necessary to control the quality of the conjunction between the glued surfaces. The use of non-contact diagnostic methods allows to analyze a larger surface which conditions in more efficient quality control process. In the study, external heat excitation was used - optical excitation with periodic variable signal (LockIn method) and unit step excitation (Pulse method). The methods of analysis of the obtained thermograms are presented.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. e0247925
Author(s):  
Pooi-Mun Wong ◽  
Shreya R. K. Sinha ◽  
Chee-Kong Chui

Blockchain has been applied to quality control in manufacturing, but the problems of false defect detections and lack of data transparency remain. This paper proposes a framework, Blockchain Quality Controller (BCQC), to overcome these limitations while fortifying data security. BCQC utilizes blockchain and Internet-of-Things to form a peer-to-peer supervision network. This paper also proposes a consensus algorithm, Quality Defect Tolerance (QDT), to adopt blockchain for during-production quality control. Simulation results show that BCQC enhances data security and improves defect detections. Although the time taken for the quality control process increases with the number of nodes in blockchain, the application of QDT allows multiple inspections on a workpiece to be consolidated at a faster pace, effectively speeding up the entire quality control process. The BCQC and QDT can improve the quality of parts produced for mass personalization manufacturing.


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