Sample on MARK 1190 Foundation of Scholarship and Research Methods

1. Introduction

1.1 Background of the research

The Supply chain management process is one of the important factors to developing a business organisation. SCM process helps an organisation maintain proper relationships with their suppliers and customers. This process provides the opportunity to increase the customer retention of an organisation in a short period of time (Darzi and Bhat, 2018). In the case of the Oil and Gas industry, the management of an organisation has to develop a proper planning and strategic development process to manage their warehouses through this SCM process. This SCM process help to increase the sales percentage of an organisation and it also increases the customer relationship process of an organisation. However, there are some issues and challenges that have been faced by the organisation under this industry (Bressanelli et al. 2019). There are changing demands of the market and the differentiation of the demand of those people. This is the reason why the research has been conducted to understand the importance of the SCM process to improve business procedures. This research process helps to understand some possible strategies. This research process helps the start-up organisation and SMEs to understand the SCM process and the issues that can be faced to develop their business process in the long run in this competitive market scenario.

1.2 Aim and objectives

Aims

The aim of this report is to identify the issues and challenges that have been faced by the Oil and Gas industry and it possible process to mitigate those issues in the meantime.

Objectives

• To understand the impact of the SCM process in the oil and gas industry.
• To identify the issues and challenges that has been faced by the organisation under this industry.
• To identify the possible strategies that has been applied by the organisations to improve their business procedure.

Research questions

• What are the issues and challenges faced by the organisations?
• What is the impact of SCM proceeds in the oil and gas industry?
• What are the strategies implemented by the organisations?

2. Literature review

2.1 Review methodology

In this context there are 23 references have been selected in case of collecting necessary data and information about the supply chain process in this industry. There are some of the references that provide information about the possible issues that have been faced by several organisations and the impact of those issues on the business procedure. Other than this, there are some references that have been taken by the strategic development process of those companies (Wang et al. 2021). There are brief descriptions of those factors that help the readers to get an overview of this topic. Other than this, these journals help to understand the possible risk factors of an organisation in case of developing this SCM process.

In this research process research has been used in a secondary analysis process for which he researched several types of journals, books, websites and newspaper articles to collect data and information about the topic (Stevenson and Cole, 2018). The researcher has analysed the journals and other information to maintain the authenticity of it and maintain the ethics of the research process. There are several types of fake information presented on the internet and the researchers have to analyse it to get the proper outcome of the research topic.

The keywords of this research process are – Advanced technologies, Training sessions, customer demands, financial stability, and customer engagement.

2.2 Review

2.2.1 Importance of supply chain management process

Supply chain process is getting the interest of most of the organisation people came to know the advantages of this management process in their business. The supply chain process help to imported customer engagement of the employees and the organisations are able to improve their customer service. This helps to increase the goodwill of their company and help guide the brand value of their organisation. A proper SCM process is necessary to maintain a well-balanced relationship with the supplies and customers. As the suppliers are able to provide quality based raw materials to the organisational and the customer is buying those organisational products and motivate their relatives to buy them (Madani and Wajeetongratana, 2019). This procedure helps to develop the customer retention of the organisation and more customers help to maximise the annual profit percentage. This process provides the advantage of having high cash flow for the organisation and maintaining the financial stability of the business process, there are employees who are able to get proper training sessions and improve their skills. This provides a competitive advantage to the organisation and they are able to surpass their competitors through their innovative products. Quality based products of organisations help to attract a large number of customers towards their business and the company is able to maintain their performance in this market.

2.2.2 Impact of supply chain management on business development

The Supply chain process plays an important role in case of developing the business procedure of an organisation under this industry. Proper SCM process provides several benefits to the organisational procedure by which the management team are able to get information of the demands and desires of their customers (Tang and Gekara, 2020). In this market scenario, increasing customer loyalty is the prime task of an organisation. It helps to increase the sales percentage of an organisation and it provides financial stability to the organisation. In this competitive market, the financial background of an organisation provides several benefits in the case that starts the development process as well as the implementation of advanced technology (Vrontis et al. 2021). The management team are now more concentrated on using the SCM process of their business for which they are implementing several types of advanced technologies. These technologies not only improve the Supply chain process of an organisation but also, they are helping to improve their planning procedure along with the risk management process.

This process helps to improve the work efficiency of those employees and they are able to improve their customer engagement process to understand the demands of those people. On the other hand, there are employees who are able to provide customer service and reply to their feedback (Henderson et al. 2019). These processes help to improve the goodwill of the company and the organisations are able to gain advantages in the long run procedure. The transparency in the Supply chain process helps to gain the trust of those people and they are able to track their orders. This increases the authenticity of the business process and tit help to maintain the brand value and brand image of a particular organisation (Chuenban et al. 2021). The SCM process increases the cash flow of an organisation by which they organisations are able to get the financial stability and the organisational team is able to improve their planning procedure through this. This SCM process maintains the quality of the raw materials and it helps to improve the product development process of an oil and gas industry.

2.2.3 Issues and challenges faced in supply chain management process

This SCM process provides several advantages and opportunities to the business organisations by which they are able to increase their customer retention percentage and increase their sales percentage. This process helps to improve ether whole working procedure of the organisation and is able to increase the earning rate of the organisations. However, there are some issues and challenges that have been found in the case of business development by a process in this oil and gas industry. This issue creates hurdles in the path of the organisational development process. Those issues are mentioned below:

Issues of suppliers

In case of having better SCM project suppliers are one of the most important members who provide the necessary raw materials and equipment to the organisations. It helps the employees to maintain their working procedures and maintain the production function of the organisations. In this, the management team have to select proper suppliers who are able to provide raw materials to the organisation in the meantime (Yu et al. 2018). However, there are chances of having issues in the delivery process of the suppliers and the quality of the raw materials. It impacts the products quality of the organisation and its impact on their sales percentage. Therefore, there is a chance of having issues if the suppliers withdraw their responsibility in the middle of the process which is able to affect the whole infrastructure of a business process.

Diversity in Customer demands

In this marketing industry, organisations have to go through fulfilling the demand and desires of their customers. In this scenario, there are a large of customers who are having their own personal choice and tastes and there are different types of market trends in this market (Shaheen and Cohen, 2020). These market trends put an impact on the demand of those people. The research and development team have to look after these market trends and develop their products under this oil and gas industry to maintain their loyal customer percentage and maintain their earning rate. It is impossible for an organisation to innovate their products to fulfil all of the demands and they are unable to order proper raw material for tier organisational purposes.

Unskilled employees

Employees are the members who are able to maintain the workflow of an organisation and increase the customer engagement process in case of improving business procedures. In this case, unskilled employees create several issues as they are unable to perform a generational task properly and it causes errors in their tasks. The management team are unable to implement the advanced technologies as they are unable to use these technologies and are able to improve their organisational performance. Other than this, unskilled employees are unable to understand the demands of their customers. The organisational team have to provide training sessions to those employees for their skill and knowledge development process (Ghale, 2018). As a result, an organisation has to bear some extra expenses and this training process is time-consuming work.

These are some of the issues that have been found through the research and analysis process that have been faced by most of the organisations which are work under this solid and gas industry. The starts up organisations have to research on those issues and prepare proper precautions to mitigate them to improve their business process in this competitive market scenario.

2.2.4. Strategies to Improve Supply Chain Process

New Service Models and types of equipment

In the supply chain management process, an organization is supposed to choose efficient suppliers who are able to provide new and proper equipment to handle the entire “production flow of goods and services”. As the supply chain management process needs to be improved in a very short period, new service models are needed to be developed by the organization. As narrated by Khan et al. (2020), these services include “Logging While Drilling” which provides the oil and gas industry with well-organized data in the drilling phase. Another service model includes “Rotary Steerable drilling” that is operated by upstream operators.

Figure 1: Models and equipment in Oil and Gas Supply Chain Management

(Source: Mubarik et al. 2019)

Increasing Concentration

An organization of this industry is supposed to maintain the actual concentration of oil so that the main function remains unchanged. The organization controls the balance between cost and revenue for their products and the fuels cause less pollution to the environment Barker et al. (2018). In this issue, several supply chain management companies have discussed the strategies to maintain the concentration of the components in the oil.

New models of Revenue

The Oil and gas industry is supposed to design new revenue models to excel in their supply chain management process. As per the view of Mikhaylov (2019), it has advantages for sharing “financial risks for future rewards” for the organizations. Several companies have shared their revenues in supply chain management to reduce the risks of loss as the pandemic situation resulted in a huge loss in this industry. The organizations exchange their stake in around 40% for purchasing the raw materials and this is supposed to stabilize their financial condition in this business.

Vertical integration

Vertical integration in the supply chain management process has an important effect, especially for the oil and gas industry. This strategy results in a “Stop shop” that provides all the important materials in one place that is supposed to be cost-effective for the industry. As described by Fan et al. (2017), Vertical integration introduces coordination among several organizations of the same industry in cost management. This strategy is supposed to reduce about 30% cost and offers their services using several software platforms by using the saved cost. The software technologies provide “surface technology” that creates opportunities for complete production and drilling systems in the oil and gas industry.

Figure 2: Vertical integration in Oil and Gas Supply Chain Management

(Source: Raut et al. 2017)

Cost-cutting

Cost-cutting is the most important strategy for managing supply chains in any industry, especially for the oil and gas industry. It is the “diet for the overweight” in supply chain management as the entire revenue of the whole year is dependent upon the cost management strategy of the organization. As described by Lu et al. (2019), cost management in supply chain management by utilizing AI technology and big data analysis process has been a smart approach towards the cost-cutting strategy. A Lesser number of highly efficient employees are needed to be hired so that a small number of employees produce a huge amount of products and this is supposed to save a huge amount of cost.

2.3 Research gaps

In this research process, there is a brief description of the importance and impact of the SCM process on the oil and gas industry. However, there are some of the problems that have been found in this research process that decreases the quality of the research process. As this research process has limited time and budget the researcher is unable to go through an in-depth research process (Boonyah, 2020). Other than this, in this research process, there is no information about the theories and models. As a result, the readers may face issues in understanding the research topic and the organisations are able to develop their strategically approach in a short period of time.

3. Research Design

3.1 Proposed Research Methods

Figure 3: Proposed Research Methods

(Source: MS-Word)

The research method will be conducted based upon secondary research and resources. There are several philosophies for research methods, among them, Positivism will be taken into use. The positivism method will be used as this is based upon the data which are feasible to be collected and less time-consuming. Another aspect of Positivism is the value of freedom that is related to the independence from the collected data from some unauthorized sources. As narrated by Salazar (2019), the data will be collected from properly authorized sources that are believable. Positivism shows the latest trends regarding supply chain management in the oil and gas industry, and this is the reason to apply Positivism philosophy in the research method for this research. This method is reliable as online journals maintain loyalty while publishing their journals and articles. Positivism is representative of valuable results and will provide results that are advantageous for this research.

Positivism is the generalizable method for research purposes and has several benefits in the research of management strategies of a supply chain in the oil and gas industries. The main objective of this research will be to identify the positive approaches towards the betterment of the supply chain management process in the oil and gas industry. The data and information collected while utilizing the second method are supposed to greatly affect the strategy development for these industries. As per the view of Raut et al. (2017), there are other approaches in the philosophies such as Realism but this will not be taken in the use for the research purpose. Realism does not contain any authorized results as a result this will not provide any reliable result for this research and that will hamper the focus of this research. Realism is based upon the assumption and that is the main cause for not choosing this philosophy in the research of supply chain management process.

There are several approaches for the research purpose of the optimization process of supply chain management in the oil and gas industry. In this research deductive approach will be taken into use as this will provide authentic information about the relationship and coordination between the variables and the concepts of this research. The concept will be measured in this research quantitatively to track records and concepts. As described by Mubarik et al. (2019), it will help to understand the strategies and consequences of the past oil and gas companies in supply chain management. The purposive sampling for this research will be chosen as it will provide the researchers’ qualitative analysis of the past research and results. A qualitative study is time-consuming and cost-effective it will be taken in the use of this research method. A descriptive research design will be taken into use for this research of optimizing the oil and gas industry in supply chain management. This has been conducted to collect new information about the latest software and technologies that are supposed to enhance the market value of the organisations in the field of supply chain management. Several journals and articles will be studied to research to optimize the supply chain management process in the oil and gas industry.

3.2 Data Collection process

The data collection process for this research will be conducted based upon the qualitative analysis. A qualitative data collection process will be done based upon the online journals and articles. As cited by Jaelani et al. (2019), several sources will be taken from various secondary sources in use to analyse the collected information as these are the authentic information for this study. Online journals have believable backgrounds which is the reason for choosing the online journals for this research. The oil and gas industry will manage the supply chain in their strategies better after the research as the supply chain management process needs the experience to run the business and to excel in the competitive market. This research will provide the oil and gas industry a clarification in their strategies to maintain their business in the right direction and in little time. The qualitative data will be collected in this research to provide a proper and experienced guideline to enhance their business by utilizing supply chain management. The collected data will be used to properly analyse the strategies of the previous business professionals in the oil and gas industry by the supply chain management process.

3.3 Data Analysis Approach/Tool

The data analysis method will be done based upon the collected data from several secondary sources such as online journals, articles, websites, and newspapers. The data will be analysed by utilizing qualitative analysis methods as this will take less time for the research and will save cost. As the research is needed to be completed in less time, this qualitative data analysis method will be taken into use. The thematic method will also be taken to analyse the collected information as this will provide flexibility in the analysing method and will be relatively easy to examine the gathered data. As narrated by Sumbal et al. (2017), a quick interpretation of the themes will be done to analyse the data. The research will be given a positive approach by utilizing these qualitative analysis methods and thematic analysis methods.

3.4 Justification of Selected Research Methods

The research will be done based upon the Positivism philosophies that have immense importance in the research method for optimizing the supply chain management process of the oil and gas industry. As per the words of Mubarik et al. (2019), Realism will not be used as it is not a reliable source for this research. The Deductive approach will be taken in use for analysing the research methods of the other researchers in this same field. These methods will be analysed with immense concentration to understand the advantages and possibilities of the supply chain management process in the marketing strategies of the oil and gas industry.

4. Conclusion

This research process is based on the optimisation process of the supply chain procedure where there are brief descriptions of the impact of this SCM process and the importance of this supply chain on the organisation performance development process. Other than this, there are some issues and risk factors that have been mentioned which are creating hurdles in the business development process of an organisation. However, there are some of the strategies have been mentioned that helps to improve the business procedure of those companies and mitigate the SCM related issues. Therefore, there are research gaps that have been mentioned that should be resolved to improve the future research process on this topic. There is positivism philosophy, deductive research approach and descriptive research design has been used which helps the researcher to conduct this research process. Apart from this, there is secondary data analysis processes has been used to research this topic and this journal provides several types of case studies of various situations to provide knowledge to the readers. This research context helps the organisations to get an overview of this topic and develop an effective planning process.

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