Essay Questions

Question 1: You are designing a grocery delivery business. Via the Internet, your company will offer staples and frozen foods in a large metropolitan area and then deliver them within a customer-defined window of time. You plan to partner with two major food stores in the area. What should be your competitive priorities and what capabilities do you want to develop in your own core and support processes?

Question 2: Is it possible for a project to have more than one critical path? Discuss the implications of such a situation with respect to each of the following aspects:

• Project risk
• Total available slack
• Resource dependencies
• Responsibilities of the project manager

Question 3: A flow chart helps us see all of the steps in a process, which in turn help us improve the process. It also helps us identify and eliminate any redundant steps in a process.

Select ONE real-world service process (for example, at a bank, at a movie theatre, at a theme park, etc.), and draw a flow chart for that process in MS Word. How can this process be improved by eliminating any redundant steps of the process and/or simply improving some of the specific steps? What you are asked to do here is called Process Mapping and is done by operations managers all the time!

Question 4: Complete additional investigation on the JIT and EOQ models. Discuss which of the two inventory models is better and why: Economic Order Quantity or Just-in-Time?

Question 5: Are quality management practices similar in manufacturing and service companies? How do they differ? Explain your answers.

Question 6: The ABC Company has a large order for special uniforms to be used in an urgent operation. Working the normal two shifts of 40 hours each per week, the ABC production process usually produces 2, 500 uniforms per week at a standard cost of $120 each. Seventy employers work the first shift and 30 the second. The contract price is $200 per uniform. Because of the urgent need, ABC is authorized to sue around-the-clock production, six days per week. When each of the two shifts work 72 hours per week, production increases to 4,000 uniforms per week but at a cost of $144 each.

• Did the multifactor productivity ratio increase, decrease, or remain the same? If it changed, by what percentage did it change?

• Did the labor productivity ratio increase, decrease, or remain the same? If it changed, by what percentage did it change?

• Did weekly profits increase, decrease, or remain the same?

Question 7: At ZYZ Company, a custom manufacturer of printed circuit boards, the finished boards are subjected to a final inspection prior to shipment to its customers. As XYZ's quality assurance manager, you are responsible for making a presentation to management on quality problems at the beginning of each month. Your assistant has analyzed the reject memos for all the circuit boards that were rejected during the past month. He has given you a summary statement listing the reference number of the circuit board and the reason for rejection from one of the following categories:

A= Poor electrolyte coverage

B=Improper lamination

C= Low copper plating

D= Plating separation

E= Improper etching

For 50 circuit boards that had been rejected last month, the summary statement showed the following:

C B C C D E C C B A D A C CC B C A C D C A C C B
A C A C B C C A C A A C C D A C CC E C C A B A C

• Prepare a tally sheet (or checklist) of the different reasons for rejection.
• Develop a Pareto chart to identify the more significant types of rejection.
• Examine the causes of the most significant type of defect, using a cause-and-effect diagram.