We will go to the courtyard to meet the other ______ of our apartment building.A.residents
We will go to the courtyard to meet the other ______ of our apartment building.
A.residents
B.vicinity
C.neighbours
D.employees
We will go to the courtyard to meet the other ______ of our apartment building.
A.residents
B.vicinity
C.neighbours
D.employees
Under no circumstances ______ to Guilin for the holiday.
A.we can consider to go
B.can we consider to go
C.we can consider going
D.can we consider going
We can conclude that the author believes______.
A.every young man and woman should go to college
B.more young people should be trained for skilled jobs
C.people with higher education should receive higher pay
D.the government should offer more opportunities for college graduates
Introduction
The following is an interview with Mick Kazinski, a senior marketing executive with Bridge Co, a Deeland-based construction company. It concerns their purchase of Custcare, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software package written by the Custcare Corporation, a software company based in Solland, a country some 4,000 km away from Deeland. The interview was originally published in the Management Experiences magazine.
Interviewer: Thanks for talking to us today Mick. Can you tell us how Bridge Co came to choose the Custcare software package?
Mick: Well, we didn’t choose it really. Teri Porter had just joined the company as sales and marketing director. She had recently implemented the Custcare package at her previous company and she was very enthusiastic about it. When she found out that we did not have a CRM package at Bridge Co, she suggested that we should also buy the Custcare package as she felt that our requirements were very similar to those of her previous company. We told her that any purchase would have to go through our capex (capital expenditure) system as the package cost over $20,000. Here at Bridge Co, all capex applications have to be accompanied by a formal business case and an Invitation to Tender (ITT) has to be sent out to at least three potential suppliers. However, Teri is a very clever lady. She managed to do a deal with Custcare and they agreed to supply the package at a cost of $19,995, just under the capex threshold. Teri had to cut a few things out. For example, we declined the training courses (Teri said the package was an easy one to use and she would show us how to use it) and also we opted for the lowest level of support, something we later came to regret. Overall, we were happy. We knew that Custcare was a popular and successful CRM package.
Interviewer: So, did you have a demonstration of the software before you bought it?
Mick: Oh yes, and everyone was very impressed. It seemed to do all the things we would ever want it to do and, in fact, it gave us some ideas about possibilities that we would never have thought of. Also, by then, it was clear that our internal IT department could not provide us with a bespoke solution. Teri had spoken to them informally and she was told that they could not even look at our requirements for 18 months. In contrast, we could be up and running with the Custcare package within three months. Also, IT quoted an internal transfer cost of $18,000 for just defining our requirements. This was almost as much as we were paying for the whole software solution!
Interviewer: When did things begin to go wrong?
Mick: Well, the implementation was not straightforward. We needed to migrate some data from our current established systems and we had no-one who could do it. We tried to recruit some local technical experts, but Custcare pointed out that we had signed their standard contract which only permitted Custcare consultants to work on such tasks. We had not realised this, as nobody had read the contract carefully. In the end, we had to give in and it cost us $10,000 in fees to migrate the data from some of our internal systems to the new package. Teri managed to get the money out of the operational budget, but we weren’t happy.
We then tried to share data between the Custcare software and our existing order processing system. We thought this would be easy, but apparently the file formats are incompatible. Thus we have to enter customer information into two systems and we are unable to exploit the customer order analysis facility of the Custcare CRM.
Finally, although we were happy with the functionality and reliability of the Custcare software, it works very slowly. This is really very disappointing. Some reports and queries have to be aborted because the software appears to have hung. The software worked very quickly in the demonstration, but it is painfully slow now that it is installed on our IT platform.
Interviewer: What is the current situation?
Mick: Well, we are all a bit deflated and disappointed in the package. The software seems reasonable enough, but its poor performance and our inability to interface it to the order processing system have reduced users’ confidence in the system. Because users have not been adequately trained, we have had to phone Custcare’s support desk more than we should. However, as I said before, we took the cheapest option. This is for a help line to be available from 8.00 hrs to 17.00 hrs Solland time. As you know, Solland is in a completely different time zone and so we have had to stay behind at work and contact them in the late evening. Again, nobody had closely read the terms of the contract. We have taken legal advice, but we have also found that, for dispute resolution, the contract uses the commercial contract laws of Solland. Nobody in Bridge Co knows what these are! Our solicitor said that we should have asked for this specification to be changed when the contract was drawn up. I just wish we had chosen a product produced by a company here in Deeland. It would have made it much easier to resolve issues and disputes.
Interviewer: What does Teri think?
Mick: Not a lot! She has left us to rejoin her old company in a more senior position. The board did ask her to justify her purchase of the Custcare CRM package, but I don’t think she ever did. I am not sure that she could!
Required:
(a) Suggest a process for evaluating, selecting and implementing a software package solution and explain how this process would have prevented the problems experienced at Bridge Co in the Custcare CRM application. (15 marks)
(b) The CEO of Bridge Co now questions whether buying a software package was the wrong approach to meeting the CRM requirements at Bridge Co. He wonders whether they should have commissioned a bespoke software system instead.
Explain, with reference to the CRM project at Bridge Co, the advantages of adopting a software package approach to fulfilling business system requirements compared with a bespoke software solution. (10 marks)
The Safe Soap Co makes environmentally-friendly soap using three basic ingredients. The standard cost card for one batch of soap for the month of September was as follows:
The budget for production and sales in September was 120,000 batches. Actual production and sales were 136,000 batches. The actual ingredients used were as follows:
Required:
(a) Calculate the total material mix variance and the total material yield variance for September. (8 marks)
(b) In October the materials mix and yield variances were as follows:
Mix: $6,000 adverse
Yield: $10,000 favourable
The production manager is pleased with the results overall, stating:
‘At the beginning of September I made some changes to the mix of ingredients used for the soaps. As I expected, the mix variance is adverse in both months because we haven’t yet updated our standard cost card but, in both months, the favourable yield variance more than makes up for this. Overall, I think we can be satisfied that the changes made to the product mix are producing good results and now we are able to produce more batches and meet the growing demand for our product.’
The sales manager, however, holds a different view and says:
‘I’m not happy with this change in the ingredients mix. I’ve had to explain to the board why the sales volume variance for October was $22,000 adverse. I’ve tried to explain that the quality of the soap has declined slightly and some of my customers have realised this and simply aren’t happy but no-one seems to be listening. Some customers are even demanding that the price of the soap be reduced and threatening to go elsewhere if the problem isn’t sorted out.’
Required:
(i) Briefly explain what the adverse materials mix and favourable materials yield variances indicate about production at Safe Soap Co in October.
Note: You are NOT required to discuss revision of standards or operational and planning variances. (4 marks)
(ii) Discuss whether the sales manager could be justified in claiming that the change in the materials mix has caused an adverse sales volume variance in October. (3 marks)
I've twice been to the wars, and as I survey the battlefield, something different is happening. It's the one-upmanship among parents. We see our kids' college rating as medals proving how well or how poorly we've raised them. But we can't acknowledge that our obsession is more about us than them. So we've contrived various justifications that turn out to be half-truths, prejudices or myths. It actually doesn't matter much whether Aaron and Nicole go to Stanford.
Admissions anxiety afflicts only a minority of parents. It's true that getting into college has generally become tougher because the number of high-school graduates has grown. From 1994 to 2006, the increase is 28 percent. Still, 64 percent of freshmen attend schools where acceptance rates exceed 70 percent, and the application surge at elite schools dwarfs population growth. Take Yale. In 1994, it accepted 18.9 percent of 12,991 applicants; this year it admitted only 8.6 percent of 21,000.
We have a full-blown prestige panic; we worry that there won't be enough medals to go around. Fearful parents prod their children to apply to more schools than ever. "The epicenters (of parental anxiety) used to be on the coasts, Boston, New York, Washington, Los Angeles", says Tom Parker, Amherst's admissions dean. "But it's radiated throughout the country".
Underlying the hysteria is the belief that scarce elite degrees must be highly valuable. Their graduates must enjoy more success because they get a better education and develop better contacts. All that's plausible and mostly wrong. "We haven't found any convincing evidence that selectivity or prestige matters", says Ernest T. Pascarella of the University of Iowa, co author of "How College Affects Students", an 827-page evaluation of hundreds of studies of the college experience. Selective schools don't systematically employ better instructional approaches than less-selective schools, according to a study by Pascarella and George Kuh of Indiana University. Some do; some don't. On two measures professors' feedback and the number of essay exams selective schools do slightly worse.
In the author's eyes, parents pushing their kids to an elite degree are ______.
A.aggressive
B.misguided
C.reasonable
D.failing
听力原文: Before we get to the student centre, I'd like to show you the Brummie hall, one of the live co education undergraduate of resident's halls at the university, just next to it is the Bmmmie dining-hall. Since there are only a few small kitchens in the dorms, most students buy meal contracts which are total in twenty meals per week to get cafeterias. It would be an exception of Sundays evenings in vacation breaks. Dining-halls like Brummie are open everyday for breakfast, lunch and dinner, students simply present their meal tickets at the door and go to the line helping themselves to eat much food they wanted. While dietitians work hard to offer students nutrition at well: balanced diet, many of our young men and women claimed that Brummie's food like most dorm food leaves much to be desired. However, there are certain times, especially around Thanksgiving and Christmas, when the dining-halls staff goes all out preparing seasonal specialties together with steak or sea-food. These dinners are always exceptional and well attended. But regardless of the supplies of cooking, Brummie is a good place to get together with friends and to meet new people. And this is the students centre which is coming up on our right.
(30)
A.They eat huge amounts of food.
B.They usually eat twice a day.
C.They usually eat to their hearts' content.
D.They eat much less than people assume.
听力原文:How do you usually go to work?
(2)
A.By bike.
B.It's very far.
C.My home is in the countryside.
D.Once a week.
What does the phrase "to run errand" mean in this context?
A.To go shopping.
B.To operate computers.
C.To help do something.
D.To shop electronically.
A.loi, fouetter, louer
B.doué, loue, goût
C.coûter, watt, douane
D.fourmi, avouer, boire
—Shall we go swimming? —Where ______ ?
A.from
B.at
C.for
D.to
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