Operation Management

Assignment 1:

Submit their work directly onto Blackboard (follow the submission link for each assignment).

You are the VP of Operations for your company and own all of your company's operations/supply chain (R&D, Planning, Procurement, Manufacturing, Inventory Control, Warehousing/ Distribution/ Transportation, and Customer Service). Your company makes only one product, 10 oz cans of tomato soup. Your boss, the Chief Operating Officer (COO), and his peers have just developed and deployed to you (and your peers) the corporate level Strategic Plan for the next 5-10 years as seen below. They have given you one month to develop the Operations/Supply Chain Strategic Plan. There are no formatting requirements. Your assignment is to explain in 3 pages (or less):

1. The process (concepts) you would utilize to develop this plan

2. What this completed plan might look like (you do not have to actually develop the plan, but at least tell me some of the strategies and measures you would consider)

3. Who you would include in the development of this plan?

Assignment 2:

submit their work directly onto Blackboard (the submission link is placed in week 6 folder).

Assignment #2 (A Continuation of Assignment #1)

You are the VP of Operations for your company and own all of your company's operations/supply chain (R&D, Planning, Procurement, Manufacturing, Inventory Control, Warehousing/ Distribution/ Transportation, and Customer Service). You are now 3 years into the 5-10 year Strategic Management Process and the company has delivered on a number of the Corporate level Objectives and Goals. The changes that impact you follow:

• Your company has acquired the cracker business.
• Your company has made the decision to expand into a second soup, 10 oz cans of Chicken Noodle soup.
• Your company now sells their products in China.
• Your Operations/Supply Chain organization has been successful at consolidating your plants and you now have only 4 plants, East Coast US, Central US, West Coast US and China.
• You have been successful at reducing Costs of Goods Sold (COGS) by 5%, but you still have 5% more to accomplish.
• Top line revenues have grown 3% primarily due to our expansion into China, but we still have 7% to accomplish.

Other changes that have taken place over the last 3 years are:
• Your tomato manufacturing lines at your 4 plants have had a production/efficiency problem. They are currently producing only at 90% of their standard production rate, or what they have historically averaged over the past 5 years.

• Quality issues with your tomato soup product are on the rise, surpassing anything you have experienced since their inception.
It is your responsibility to determine how your company will manufacture these new products while at the same time continuing to reduce costs and deal with the quality and production efficiency problems.

There are no formatting requirements. Your assignment is to explain in 3 pages (or less):

1. How you would go about dealing with the changes, new opportunities and issues above

You do not necessarily have to solve the new opportunities and problems, but instead just tell me how you would go about it. Any insight into how you would solve the new opportunities and problems will add positive points to your grade though.

You will be graded on the completeness, accuracy, quality of your response and how well you convince me that you understand the subject matter. There are numerous concepts to take into consideration here and I would not expect anyone to be able to identify all of them, let alone combine them into a 3 page response. So you will be graded on how many of these concepts you are able to identify and utilize correctly within your response.