BST823 Individual Written Report Resit 2025 | CU

BST823 Individual Written Report

For this coursework, you are required to prepare a 2000-word report on supplier payment times for the following five supermarkets.

• Lidl Great Britain Ltd.
• Aldi Stores Ltd.
• Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Ltd.
• Asda Stores Ltd.
• Tesco Stores Ltd.

The report should contain the following sections:

A. Introduction: set out the objectives of the report, data collection strategy, summary of results and conclusions. [100 words approx.]

B. Literature review: Review the academic and practitioner literature on supplier payment times and practices, covering the aspects listed below. [600 words approx.]

• Importance of on-time payment for suppliers
• Prevalence of late payment/non-payment across the industry
• Causes of late payment/non-payment by firms
• Negative effects of late payment/non-payment on suppliers and supply chains
• Solutions to late payment/non-payment

Note: the literature review should address how late payment is a problem across all industries, not just supermarkets.

C. Analysis: Perform an analysis of payment performance for the five supermarkets listed above. The analysis should include descriptive text and tables/charts/line charts, etc. You are expected to collect data on supplier payment times for each of the five supermarkets covering the years 2018-2024 inclusive. The measures of payment performance you are expected to analyse are set out below. [900 words approx.]

• Average time to pay suppliers (in days).
• % breakdown of time to pay suppliers by < 30 days, 31-60 days, 61+ days.
• % invoices not paid to suppliers within the agreed terms, i.e., non-compliant.
• Shortest (standard) and maximum contractual period to pay suppliers.
• Whether a firm participates in payment codes, uses e-invoicing and offers SCF (yes/no).

D. Discussion: Discuss the overall performance of the five supermarkets when it comes to paying suppliers, noting any changes throughout analysis. Reflect on whether their performance needs to improve and, if so, indicate what action they should take to ensure suppliers receive payment on time and as agreed. [400 words approx.]

Assignment Guidelines

• The word limit for the report is 2000 +/-10%.
• References are not included in the word limit.
• Sources for the literature review can be academic and practitioner.
• Numeric data on supplier payment times is available from the UK Government at the following link. You can search for firms individually, or you can download the population of firms as a CSV file.
• Information on the Fair Payment Code can be found on the Small Business Commissioner website
• Ensure that all source material is correctly cited in the text and referenced in the bibliography. Follow the Cardiff-Harvard Referencing system
• Use headings for each section in the report.
• Add titles to any figures or tables used, e.g., Figure 1: Trends in supplier payment times. Table 1: Average payment time.
• ChatGPT or other AI-generative software is not permitted for use on this report. Using it will be considered Academic Misconduct. I want you to use your intelligence in compiling the report, not artificial intelligence!

Assessment type: Individual written report. Do not share your work with others. Do not use ChatGPT or other AI-generative software to write your report.

Weighting: 100%

Assessment criteria: see marking rubric below in Table 1.

Submission procedure: Turnitin on BST823 Learning Central.

Table 1 Marking rubric