| Course | GB528 Global Strategy |
|---|---|
| Unit | Unit 8 |
| Paper type | Value chain audit |
| Length | About 1,120 words, 7 pages double-spaced |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| School | Purdue University Global |
| Program | MBA |
| Updated | October 2026 |
Free sample paper for GB528 Unit 8
Nine Activities Between a Drum of Resin and a Wall in Surabaya: A Unit 8 Value Chain Audit
[Student Name]
Purdue University Global
GB528: Global Strategy
Unit 8 Value Chain Audit
[Instructor Name]
[Date]
The paint maker, its venture, its partner and every figure are composite and illustrative; the frameworks and sources cited are real.
Exhibit 1: The Activity Map
Porter (1985) describes the value chain as the set of activities a firm performs to design, make, sell and support its product, each of which can add value or cost. For the Indonesian venture, the chain runs across four organizations: Ohio Valley Coatings, its regional concentrate plant, the joint venture and the distribution partner, with independent shops at the end.
1. Research and formulation: Ohio Valley, Louisville, United States.
2. Raw material purchasing: Ohio Valley, Louisville, under global contracts for resin and titanium dioxide.
3. Resin emulsion and tint concentrate production: Ohio Valley's regional plant in Rayong, Thailand, serving Southeast Asia.
4. Paint making and filling: the joint venture's plant in Karawang, West Java.
5. Finished goods warehousing: the joint venture, Karawang and two regional depots.
6. Distribution: the partner's trucks on Java and Sumatra and inter-island shipping to Surabaya's depot and beyond.
7. Tinting at the point of sale: independent shops using machines owned by the venture.
8. Painter training and loyalty: the venture's field marketing team.
9. Technical service and complaints: shared among the shops, the partner's sales representatives, the venture's customer service desk, its quality lab and Ohio Valley's chemists in Louisville.
Best Location for Each Activity
Research and formulation stays in Louisville, where the chemists and test labs are, but needs an application lab in Karawang to test products under local conditions.
Purchasing stays global, because buying resin and pigment for all markets together gives the best prices.
Concentrate production belongs in Rayong. Tint concentrates and resin emulsions are valuable and compact enough to ship, and one plant serving the region achieves scale no single country could.
Paint making and filling belongs in Karawang, near the market. A can of finished paint is mostly water and filler, worth little per kilogram, so making it near buyers saves freight.
Distribution, tinting and painter programs must be local, since they depend on reaching shops and people across the islands.
Technical service is the activity in the wrong place, as the handoff table shows.
The chain is well placed for making and moving paint and badly placed for learning what goes wrong with it on the wall.
Exhibit 2: The Handoff Table
Each transfer between organizations or teams adds time and the chance of losing information. For a routine order, there are four handoffs: shop to partner sales representative, partner to venture warehouse, warehouse to partner trucks, trucks to shop. Order-to-delivery time on Java averages four days, which is competitive.
For a complaint, there are six: painter to shop owner, shop owner to partner sales representative, sales representative to the partner's regional office, regional office to the venture's customer service desk, customer service to the venture's quality lab, and quality lab to Ohio Valley's chemists in Louisville. In the venture's first year, complaints took about forty days on average to reach a chemist, and some, such as peeling on exterior walls in coastal areas, were never resolved because samples were lost along the way.
Where the Value Is Captured
A rough split of the venture's cost per liter shows where money is made. In a liter of premium paint, raw materials, mostly resin and pigment, make up roughly 45 percent of cost; concentrate and paint making for about 15 percent; packaging for about 10 percent; and distribution, shop margins and painter programs for about 30 percent. The largest single lever on margin is therefore purchasing, which is why it stays global. The second is the distribution and shop chain, where the partner's efficiency matters most. Technical service is a small cost, but it protects the brand that lets the venture charge premium prices.
Why the Delay Matters
Complaints are the venture's best source of knowledge about how its products perform in Indonesian conditions. A forty-day delay means a formulation problem can affect thousands of liters of paint before anyone who can fix it hears about it. It also damages trust with painters, who choose the brand and talk to each other. Bartlett and Ghoshal (1989) argue that transnational firms must move knowledge between subsidiaries and headquarters quickly, and the venture's complaint path does the opposite.
Recommendations
Create a direct technical service line. Painters and shop owners should be able to report problems directly to the venture's technical service team by phone or messaging app, with photos, bypassing the partner's sales chain for technical issues.
Station a chemist in Karawang. An application chemist at the venture's plant, linked to Louisville, would handle most complaints within days and send only unresolved cases on.
Add sample kits to the shops. Shops should hold kits for collecting paint and substrate samples, with prepaid courier labels to the Karawang lab.
Track the time. The venture should measure the days from first report to diagnosis and set a target of five working days.
Ferdows (1997) describes how foreign plants can grow from production sites into sources of knowledge for the whole firm. A Karawang lab that resolves tropical performance problems could become the center of expertise for all of Ohio Valley's tropical markets.
The Partner's Interests
The partner may resist a direct line from shops to the venture, because its sales representatives use their role in handling problems to build relationships with shop owners. Bypassing them could look like an attempt to take over those relationships, which is exactly the risk the partner evaluation in Unit 5 identified from the partner's side. The venture should therefore copy the partner's representative on every technical case and report outcomes to the partner monthly, so that the representative still closes the loop with the shop. The aim is to move diagnosis, not to take relationships away.
Effect on the Chain
With a direct line and a chemist in Karawang, the complaint path falls from six handoffs to two: painter or shop to the venture's technical service, and technical service to the chemist. The target of five days would cut the delay by about 87 percent. The partner keeps its role in orders and delivery, where its handoffs work well.
Conclusion
The venture's chain is sensibly located for making and distributing paint. Its weakness is in learning from the wall. Moving technical service close to painters and cutting handoffs would turn complaints from a source of lost trust into a source of knowledge for the venture and its parent.
References
Bartlett, C. A., & Ghoshal, S. (1989). Managing across borders: The transnational solution. Harvard Business School Press.
Ferdows, K. (1997). Making the most of foreign factories. Harvard Business Review, 75(2), 73-88.
Porter, M. E. (1985). Competitive advantage: Creating and sustaining superior performance. Free Press.
Reading the GB 528 Unit 8 instructions
GB528 Unit 8 asks you to audit a firm's international value chain for one market. Map every activity from inputs to after-sales service, showing which organization performs it and where. For each activity, judge whether its location gives the best return, with reasons such as scale, freight and closeness to customers. Count the handoffs between organizations for key flows, such as orders and complaints, and measure how long they take. Identify where the chain is weakest, recommend changes, and consider the interests of partners affected by them. Expect about six pages with an activity map and a handoff table, citing value chain and global strategy sources in APA 7.
Inside the GB528 Unit 8 example
Exhibit 1 maps nine activities across Ohio Valley, its Rayong plant, the venture and the partner, citing Porter's value chain. A location review explains why purchasing stays global, concentrate is made regionally and paint is filled near buyers, and the highlighted sentence finds the chain weak at learning from the wall. A cost split shows raw materials at about 45 percent of a liter's cost. Exhibit 2 counts four handoffs for an order and six for a complaint, averaging about forty days. Bartlett and Ghoshal explain why slow knowledge flows hurt a transnational. Recommendations add a direct line, a Karawang chemist and sample kits, and Ferdows frames the lab's future role. The partner's interests are addressed.
GB528 Unit 8 rubric: what earns full points
Credit in this GB528 audit goes to a complete activity map, location judgments with reasons and handoffs counted rather than described. Mapping every activity with its organization and place earns early credit. Judging each location by scale, freight and customer closeness shows strategic reasoning. Counting handoffs and measuring their time carries significant weight, because it turns a process description into evidence. Finding the weakest link and fixing it shows judgment. Considering the partner's interest in the changes shows awareness of how alliances work. Linking the fix to the plant's future role shows depth. Porter's value chain, Bartlett and Ghoshal and Ferdows anchor the audit's APA 7 list.
GB528 Unit 8 help from the desk
Many GB528 Unit 8 audits describe Porter's primary and support activities in general and never place them on a map of organizations and countries. Others judge locations without counting the handoffs that link them. A common gap is knowledge flow: a chain can make and move goods well while learning slowly from customers, and complaint paths often show it. Some writers propose cutting a partner out without asking how it will react. Map the activities, judge each location, count handoffs and time them, find the weakest link, fix it with the partner's interests in mind and say how the fix builds capability. Setting a target in days for the slowest flow gives the recommendation a measure.
Get a GB528 Unit 8 example written to your instructions
Send the firm, the countries its chain spans, the rubric, and what your Unit 8 prompt asks. Every activity is mapped to a location with a reason, two or more paths are traced and their handoffs counted, and changes appear as reduced counts. The custom audit comes back in 24-48h, the first at no charge, with missing operational figures bracketed. The paper above is an original model document written by our desk, not a submitted student paper and not an official Purdue University Global document.
More GB528 papers and MBA samples
- GB528 Unit 1: Discussion Board Post
- GB528 Unit 2: Industry Analysis
- GB528 Unit 3: Case Analysis
- GB528 Unit 4: Entry Mode Comparison
- GB528 Unit 5: Partner Evaluation
- GB528 Unit 6: Seminar Reflection
- GB528 Unit 7: Strategic Analysis
- GB528 Unit 9: Implementation Plan
- GB528 Unit 10: Strategy Recommendation
- GB527 Unit 8: Network Design Analysis
- GB526 Unit 8: Negotiation Analysis
- GB525 Unit 8: Regulatory Comparison
- GB520 Unit 8: Compensation Strategy
GB528 Unit 8 questions, answered
How do configuration and coordination differ?
Michael Porter used configuration for where a firm's activities are located, concentrated in one place or dispersed across many, and coordination for how those dispersed activities are linked and managed. Most audits handle configuration well and coordination poorly. Tracing a real process through the chain, such as an order or a complaint, is one practical way to examine coordination.
Does a value chain audit need cost figures?
Some, where they decide a location. Scale economies in purchasing, freight on heavy goods and labor cost differences are the usual examples. Composite or estimated figures are acceptable if labeled. What the audit cannot do without is a reason for each location, whether that reason is cost, quality, speed or proximity to the customer.
Why count handoffs rather than just describe the process?
A count makes coordination measurable and a recommendation testable. Saying the complaint process is slow invites agreement; showing it crosses seven organizational boundaries and takes forty days invites a solution. Before and after counts also let a reader judge whether a proposed change is worth what it costs to make.
Where can I find a free GB528 Unit 8 sample paper?
This page carries a full GB528 Unit 8 value chain audit of a paint venture in Indonesia, with an activity map across three countries, a handoff table, location judgments, recommendations and APA 7 references.
Why does a forty-day complaint path matter?
Complaints are the venture's best evidence of how its paint performs in Indonesian conditions. A forty-day delay lets a formulation problem affect thousands of liters before a chemist hears of it, and it erodes trust with the painters who choose the brand.