Management Essentials CW3 Summative Assessment Brief BPP University

General Assessment Guidance

• Your summative assessment for this module is made up of this coursework submission, which accounts for 100% of the marks.
• Please note that late submissions will not be marked.
• You are required to submit all elements of your assessment via Turnitin online access. Only submissions made via the specified mode will be accepted, and hard copies or any other digital form of submissions (like via email or pen drive, etc.) will not be accepted.
• For coursework, the submission word limit is 5,000 words. You must comply with the word count guidelines. You may submit LESS than 5,000 words but not more. Word Count guidelines can be found on your programme home page and the coursework submission page.
• Do not put your name or contact details anywhere on your submission. You should only put your student registration number (SRN), which will ensure your submission is recognised in the marking process.
• A total of 100 marks is available for this module assessment, and you are required to achieve a minimum of 50% to pass this module.
• You are required to use only the Harvard Referencing System in your submission. Any content that is already published by other author(s) and is not referenced will be considered a case of
  plagiarism.
  You can find further information on Harvard Referencing in the online library on the Hub. You can use the following link to access this information: BPP Guide
• BPP University has a strict policy regarding the authenticity of assessments. In proven instances of plagiarism or collusion, severe punishment will be imposed on offenders. You are advised to read the rules and regulations regarding plagiarism and collusion in the GARS and UPPS which are
  available on the HUB in the Help and Support section under Documents and Forms.
• Use of AI in assessments is only allowed to review a draft, correct language errors or if specified in the summative assessment brief. If you have used AI for any of these purposes, you should indicate this on the Assignment Cover sheet. For more information regarding acceptable and unacceptable use of AI, please enrol on the Generative AI Foundations course on the HUB.
• You should include a completed copy of the Assignment Cover sheet. Any submission without this completed Assignment Cover sheet may be considered invalid and not marked.

Assessment Brief

This module is assessed through one graded element worth 100%. You must achieve at least 50% to pass the module. For this assignment, you will produce a Business Consultancy Report based on Nestlé, written in an academic style.

By completing this assessment, you will achieve the following learning outcomes (LOS):

• LO1 – Critically assess management practice within organisations.
• LO2 – Apply your understanding of management principles concerning key business challenges.
• LO3 – Critically evaluate how management behaviours can promote organisational success.
• LO4 – Defend skills required to be an effective manager in a given business context.

Assessment Scenario

Acting as a Business Consultant, you are required to produce a business report for the senior management team at Nestlé, by utilising the techniques and concepts you have covered in the module.

Overview

Nestlé S.A., headquartered in Vevey, Switzerland, is the world’s largest manufacturer of packaged food and beverage products. It sells a broad range of items, including baby food, chocolates, quick-cooking noodles, frozen entrees, ice cream, breakfast cereals, and pet food. The company also produces powdered and liquid beverages, including infant formula, instant coffee, condensed milk, and bottled water, and offers other products through its large number of subsidiaries.

Nestlé’s history can be traced back to two companies founded in Switzerland at about the same time: the Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company in 1866 and Farine Lactée Henri Nestlé in 1867. Farine
Lactée was founded by a German pharmacist, Henri Nestlé, who created a substitute for breast milk he called Farine Lactée. The high rate of infant mortality at that time was caused in part by the
inability of some babies to nurse. Farine Lactée was designed to provide a nutritious substitute for breast milk.

The two rival companies merged in 1905, and this development was a major milestone in establishing the combined company as a multinational powerhouse. Now known by the name of one of the founders, Nestlé had a presence in almost two hundred countries by the 2020s. It's hundreds of factories produce products for thousands of brands, some developed internally, and many others were brought into the company via strategic acquisitions. Some of its best-known brands include Kit Kat chocolate bars, Nescafé coffee, Dreyer’s ice cream, Gerber baby food, and Purina pet foods. Despite its strong profits and international brand recognition, the company has also been criticised for its business practices, environmental record, and tolerance of forced labour in its supply chains.

History

Advances in the science of preserving food in the early nineteenth century led to businesses that implemented new methods to create safe, convenient, and easy-to-transport foods. Condensed milk and infant formula were the first products made by the two rival companies that ultimately merged to form what is now known as Nestlé S.A. Following the merger in 1905, the company opened seven factories across Europe. When World War I broke out in 1914, however, production in Europe became more difficult. Thus, Nestlé decided to buy factories in areas of the world less affected by the war, such as the United States, Latin America, and Australia. While the Great Depression and World War II led to ups and downs for Nestlé, the company generally adapted to the times and prospered. What helped was its introduction of instant coffee, Nescafé, in the late 1930s and instant tea, Nestea, in the early 1940s. Both products were immensely popular.

Merging with and acquiring other companies has historically characterized Nestlé’s business strategy. For example, Alimentana S.A., which made Maggi soups, bouillon, and seasonings merged with Nestlé in 1947. Nestlé continued to acquire other companies in the food business. It began to diversify in 1974 when it purchased a large stake in the cosmetics company L’Oréal, and it continued the process in 1977 by purchasing pharmaceutical company Alcon Laboratories.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Nestlé continued to expand and make major acquisitions. It purchased companies that manufactured milk, chocolate, coffee, frozen food, mineral water, pet food, and other products. In 1991, Nestlé entered into a partnership with the Coca-Cola Company to market Nescafé and other coffee products using Coca-Cola’s worldwide distribution network. Later in the 1990s, the company sought to focus more on food than on the cosmetics and healthcare industries, which had not grown significantly. Peter Brabeck-Letmathe became CEO of Nestlé in 1997, and he initially emphasized internal growth for the company before focusing once again on acquisitions. The company paid $600 million in 2006 to acquire Jenny Craig, Inc., the weight-loss company. The acquisition was not a success, and Nestlé sold Jenny Craig in 2013. In 2007, Nestlé acquired Gerber, the iconic US baby food brand, from Novartis for over $5 billion, further strengthening its position in the baby food market. Three years later, the company bought Kraft Foods’ North American frozen pizza business for over $3 billion.

In January 2018, as the share of sales from the company's US confectionery remained stagnant or in decline in large part due to greater demand for healthier food options, Nestlé sold this part of its business to the Italian company Ferrero for $2.8 billion in favour of focusing more on aspects such as bottled water and pet products. Indeed, by April of that year, the company reported greater profits
from its pet care brands in terms of its US businesses, as American consumers seemed to be investing more money in their pets.

The company continued to adapt to changing market conditions and consumer preferences in the early 2020s. It acquired other brands, particularly those in the health food and supplements sector, including vitamin manufacturer Bountiful Company in 2021 and plant-based food producer Puravida in 2022. Meanwhile, Nestlé also shifted away from some other longstanding parts of its business. For example, in early 2021, Nestlé completed the $4.3 billion sale of its water-bottling operations, including Poland Spring and other regional bottled water brands, to a private equity firm. In 2023, Nestlé continued its strong economic performance, beating first-quarter earnings expectations, yet the company was criticised for achieving this goal through the cost inflation of its products, with prices for the company’s products increasing over 10 per cent.

Impact

By the twenty-first century, Nestlé had become one of the most recognised food brands in the world, offering a diverse selection of products through its brand name and subsidiaries.

A key part of Nestlé’s stated mission is nutrition, health, and wellness. Although many of its products are high in sugar and fat, the company is also developing others that meet consumers’ tastes for healthier, more nutritious food. In early 2015, the company announced that it was planning to remove artificial dyes and flavours from many of its candies. Nestlé also founded its own Institute of Health Sciences, which does nutrition research. The company uses scientific innovations to create new products; an example is a lactose-free infant formula with a probiotic that helps infants with diarrhoea. In 2014, Nestlé announced the creation of Nestlé Skin Health S.A., a subsidiary specialising in scientifically tested dermatology products. Three years later, the company acquired Sweet Earth, a plant-based food manufacturer.

Despite these endeavours, Nestlé has been involved in several controversies throughout its history, including many in the twenty-first century. In the 1970s, the company was criticised for how it marketed infant formula to parents in developing countries. The formula was touted as being more beneficial to infants than breast milk. Advertisements did not stress the importance of preparing the formula with clean water. The product was comparatively expensive for many consumers, some of whom diluted the powder to make it last longer. Nestlé was accused of not educating parents on the proper use of the product, and as a consequence, many newborn babies suffered from malnutrition and the ingestion of polluted water, leading to several deaths.

Furthermore, the Indian government’s food safety agency reported in May 2015 that Nestlé’s popular Maggi noodles contained unsafe levels of lead. The product was pulled from the shelves while an investigation took place. Yet another controversy in 2017 was that Nestlé Waters North America continued bottling water sourced in California, despite the years-long drought in that region. At the time, Nestlé was accused of wasting 30 per cent of the water it drew from California. The company's production of bottled water continued to face criticism into the 2020s amid recurring droughts in parts of the US and concerns about plastic pollution, although Nestlé's sale of most of its bottled water brands in 2021 shifted some of the future responsibility away from the company.

In addition to these scandals, Nestlé's labour practices have also come under scrutiny, particularly those related to the company's cocoa production on its West African plantations. In 2005 the company faced a lawsuit related to the use of child slave labour in its cocoa supply chains, filed by the International Labor Rights Fund on behalf of three Malian children who had worked as enslaved child labourers on cocoa plantations, though Nestlé denied having any "ethical responsibility" for its suppliers' labour practices. Despite mounting criticism and legal pressure, in 2019, Nestlé revealed that it was still unable to certify that all its products were free of child slave labour, and in 2021 was included alongside many other food corporations in a class-action lawsuit from formerly enslaved child labourers in Mali. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in 2022. The company faced other labour controversies throughout the early twenty-first century; for example, it was accused of carrying out anti-union activities in Colombia during this time, and in 2015, the company admitted that its seafood supply chains in Thailand included forced labour.

The Case Study can also be accessed from:

Mahtani, S.M. (2023) ‘Nestlé’, Salem Press Encyclopedia [Preprint]. Available at:
EBSCO (Accessed: 22 November 2024).

Note: To access the article, use your BPP library login credentials.

It is recommended that you carry out a substantial amount of independent and individual research to strengthen your understanding of the business context and the preferred style of management practice.

Assessment Task

You are to critically evaluate the current management practices at Nestlé and recommend changes based on your evaluation that the company must implement to improve its success in the Food and beverages sector.

Task 1 – Management Practices (LO1)

Conduct a comprehensive analysis of Nestlé ’s management practices, describing its key aspects and critically assessing these management practices.

Support your arguments concerning appropriate academic literature, case study materials and your independent research.

Task 2 – Analysis of Business Challenges (LO2)

Identify significant business challenges faced by Nestlé. Apply relevant management principles to analyse how Nestlé addressed these challenges.

Support your arguments about appropriate academic literature, case study materials and your independent research.

Task 3 – Impact of Management Behaviours on Organisational Performance (LO3)

Critically evaluate the potential impact of Nestlé ’s managers’ behaviour on the overall organisation’s performance.

Support your arguments about appropriate academic literature, case study materials and your independent research.

Task 4 – Management competencies development (LO4)

Critically assess different management competencies and defend why these skills are important for current and future managers at Nestlé to improve its success in the Food and beverage industry.

Support your arguments concerning appropriate academic literature, case study materials and your independent research.

Assessment Guidelines:

Introduction

• Define leadership and management, and provide an overview of the purpose of your report, including an indication of the contents.

Task 1 – Management Practices

• Identify Nestlé ’s mission, values and management practices.
• Critically assess whether Nestlé’s mission, values and management practices are all aligned.

Task 2 – Analysis of Business Challenges

• Identify and critically discuss 2 key challenges that Nestlé is encountering in the current environment.
• Analyse Nestlé ’s current management competency of Creativity and Innovation using a relevant model/ framework.
• Critically discuss the effectiveness of Nestlé’s current management competency of Creativity and Innovation to enable Nestlé ’s management to resolve the challenges identified.
• Analyse Nestlé’s management competency of decision-making using a relevant model/ framework.
• Critically evaluate how effectively the management competency of Decision-making is being used in mitigating the challenges identified.

Task 3 – Impact of Management Behaviours on Organisational Performance

• Analyse the emotional intelligence of Nestlé’s managers using a relevant model/framework.
• Analyse the positive and negative effects of these behaviours on Nestlé’s performance.
• Give recommendations for cultivating or modifying these management behaviours to enhance Nestlé’s success.

Task 4 – Management competencies development

Select any 2 management competencies from the following and critically assess the selected competencies using relevant models/ frameworks.

• Managing Resilience
• Managing Stakeholder Relationships
• Managing Conflict and Negotiation
• Managing Teams

Propose recommendations for developing and nurturing these skills among current and future managers at Nestlé to improve its success in the Food and beverage Industry.

Conclusion

Provide a conclusion that summarises your recommended changes that Nestlé must implement to improve its success in the Food and beverages industry.

Presentation and Referencing

Your report structure should include the following sections:

• Cover page (BPP University Administration Cover Sheet)
• Table of Contents
• List of Abbreviations (if appropriate)
• Introduction
• Task 1
• Task 2
• Task 3
• Task 4
• Conclusion
• References
• Appendix (if required)

Word count: 5000 words

Word count – only applies to the main body (shown in bold); i.e., cover page, table of contents, list of abbreviations, references, assessment self-evaluation, and appendix are not part of the 5000-word count.