BSOP 434 WEEK 4 LAB EASING IRA’S IRE
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BSOP 434 WEEK 4 LAB EASING IRA’S
IRE
Lab 4: Easing Ira’s Ire
(See “Due Dates for Assignments & Exams”
in the Syllabus for due dates.)
Submit your assignment to the Dropbox located
on the silver tab at the top of this page.
Scenario/Summary
Ira Pollack was difficult to work for. A
self-made millionaire, he paid extremely high salaries, but demanded much from
his subordinates, including being on call 24-hours per day. In his Las Vegas
penthouse, he would study and re-study each detail of his conglomerate’s
performance and then call some unlucky underling—at any hour—to vent his anger
and demand that something be improved. His tantrums were legendary.
One of Pollack’s underlings, Tamara Wood, was
driving her new red Mercedes convertible along Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills,
looking for a parking space. Her college class from Northern Illinois
University at DeKalb was holding its fifth reunion in Chicago, which she
planned to attend. She wanted to buy a new outfit for the event, to show her
former classmates that she had arrived. A chauffeur-driven Rolls pulled away
from the curb, leaving an empty space right in front of her favorite couturier.
She swung her Mercedes expertly into the empty space, looked up, and was
pleased to see that there was still nearly an hour left on the meter. “Daddy
was right,” she thought to herself, “Clean living does pay off.”
As she turned off the ignition, Tamara’s cell
phone started buzzing. Wood hesitated. Would it be John, calling to thank her
for that wonderful evening? Would it be Matt, seeing if she were free to spend
next weekend on Catalina Island? Or maybe it was Jason, who was always wanting
her to accompany him to Waikiki. She finally picked up the phone and sweetly
said, “Hello.”
“Don’t ‘hello’ me!” shouted a man’s voice at
the other end.
Wood’s stomach churned, her muscles
tightened, and she said, weakly, “Sorry, Mr. Pollack, I was expecting somebody
else.”
“That’s obvious,” he retorted. “At this hour
of the day, you’re on my time and should be thinking of business. How come
you’re not in the office?”
“I’m just making a customer service
follow-up,” responded Wood, hoping that Mr. Pollack would not ask for too many
details.
“Well, you should be worried about customer
service,” said Pollack. “That’s why I’ve called. I’ve been studying performance
records for all my operations dealing with the amount of time that elapses
between our receipt of an order and when our customer receives a shipment. The
performance of your distribution center in West Hollywood stinks! Drop what
you’re doing and get back to your office and figure out what’s wrong! Then tell
me what’s needed to speed up your operation. Call me as soon as you have
answers.”
Wood heard the phone click. She forgot about
DeKalb. She forgot about Chicago and the new outfit. She forgot about her night
with John, about Catalina Island and Waikiki. She heard a faint beep to her
left. She saw a maroon Jaguar with a Beverly Hills matron motioning with one of
her white-gloved hands as if to say, “If you’re leaving, may I have your
parking spot?”
Muttering to herself, she pulled into her
reserved slot next to the West Hollywood distribution center. “Aloha!” chirped
Ellen Scott, her assistant, as she walked in. “Jason has called three times
about wanting you to fly to Hawaii. Also, you have two calls from John, one
from Matt, one from your mother, who asked why you never phone her, and one
from some fellow who wouldn’t leave his name, but said it was very personal.
Tell me about the outfit you bought. I’ll bet it’s stunning.”
“Forget about them, and hold all my calls,”
said Wood, crisply. “I’m not going anywhere. Pollack called me and is mad
because our order processing and delivery times are out of whack.”
Two days passed. Wood had put her social life
on hold and had not even phoned her mother. All her time was spent trying to
figure out how to speed up her order-processing system. But she didn’t know how
to start. The accuracy of the system was not an issue, although additional
costs could be. When Pollack paid his bonuses last year, he had told Wood that
if her operation had cost one cent more to run, she would not have receive a
bonus. Because her bonus had paid for her new Mercedes, Wood was
cost-conscious, to say the least.
Wood’s assistant helped her, too—at least
through late Friday afternoon. Scott explained that she couldn’t work on
Saturday and Sunday because she’d accepted an invitation to spend the weekend
at Catalina Island with an unnamed friend. Before Scott left, she and Wood had
decided that there were 12 distinct operations involved in processing and
shipping orders. Some could be performed at the same time, whereas others had
to be performed in sequence—that is, one could not be started until the other
was completed. (These tasks, the amount of time it takes to complete each, and
the sequential relationships, if any, are shown in Exhibit 11-A.)
After compiling the information shown in
Exhibit 11-A, Scott left. Wood was left with the task of trying to relate all
those tasks to each other. She recalled a college textbook that she had never
much cared for but that she had come across a few weeks earlier as she was
searching for her Northern Illinois University yearbook. Wood looked at a PERT
chart in that book and knew that she would have to construct something similar
to analyze the distribution center’s order processing and shipping operations.
She studied the text accompanying the chart, sighed, and thought to herself,
“Where was I or at least where was my mind—the day the professor explained all
of this in class?
Deliverables
This week’s lab consists of five questions.
Please be certain you answer all the questions and address all the areas
outlined in the grading below.
L A B S T E P S
Step 1: PERT Chart
Step 1: PERT Chart
Question 1: Arrange the tasks shown in
Exhibit 11-A in a network or PERT chart.
Step 2: Critical Path
Question 2: Determine the critical path. What
is the least amount of time it takes between receipt of an order and its
delivery to a customer?
Step 3: Risk
Question 3: Considering your answers to
questions 1 and 2, what areas of activity do you think Wood should look at
first, assuming she wants to reduce order-processing and delivery times? Why?
Step 4: Order Picker
Question 4: Now that she’s a Californian
ready for the race down the information superhighway, Wood wants to be able to
impress Pollack with her knowledge of current technology. Recently, a sales
representative from a warehouse equipment company called, trying to interest
her in installing a Star Wars—Robotic” order picker for the warehouse.
Controlled by lasers and powered by magnetic levitation, the device can pick
orders (task H) in 15 minutes, rather than 6 hours (0.75 day), the current time
needed. How valuable would such a device be to Wood? Why?
Step 5: Faster Transportation
Question 5: Another alternative is to use
faster transportation. How should Wood choose between paying more for faster
transportation and paying more for other improvements? Assume that her only
goal is speed.
Step 6: Final Step
Submit your completed assignment to the this
week’s Lab Dropbox in a MS Word document for grading. The cover page should
adhere to the APA 6.0 guideline.
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