[Review the inventory database of retailing vs. manufacturing business]

By

Acknowledgement

I would take this opportunity to express gratitude my study supervisor, family and friends for their support and guidance without which this study would not have been possible.

DECLARATION

I, [type your full first titles and last name here], declare that the contents of this thesis comprise my own unaided work, and that the thesis has not before been submitted for academic written test in the direction of any qualification. Furthermore, it comprises my own opinions and not inevitably those of the University.

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Methodology

The purpose of this chapter is to explain and justify the methods and processes we have used in our research. It is in this chapter that we discuss and give reasons for our course of action. In each section, theoretical definition and explanation is followed by our own methodology. We start by describing research strategy, the case study design, the method, data collection and triangulation. Finally, the process of analyzing the data and evaluation of our research results is discussed.

Research Strategy

There are several research strategies to choose from when under-taking social science research. Depending on what the researcher wants to investigate, the researcher has to determine which research strategy best suits the purpose of study. The five relevant situations for research strategies are; experiments, survey, archival analysis, history and case study26. These different research strategies imply different ways of collecting and analyzing the empirical evidence, providing for various advantages and disadvantages. Different strategies are also favored for questions who, what, where and why. As a result, the first thing the researcher must do is to identify the type of research question posed. If the research question focuses on “what”, survey strategies or the analysis of archival records are likely to be the best choice. These two strategies are advantageous with regard to the discrepancies of incidence or prevalence of a phenomenon, or when the research goal is to predict certain outcomes. In addition, case studies, histories and experiments are more suited to “how” and “why” research questions (Aaker, 1999).

This is because; such questions mostly deal with operational links, which have to be traced over time rather than frequencies or incidence. Secondly, the control an investigator has over actual behavioral events further helps the researcher to identify the strategy that best suits the purpose of study. The needed extent of control over certain situation varies in the different. Research schemes and they all have their characteristic characteristics. Surveys, archival analyses, histories do not require control over the events, and they are the best strategies where the researcher is dealing with cases that happened in the past. Conducting experiments means that the events can be manipulated directly and systematically and held under control. The third condition is the focus on a contemporary as opposed to a historical phenomenon, which is advantageous when the purpose of the research is to generalize in an analytical way.

According to Yin, histories can also be done about contemporary events, and in this situation, the ...