OPERATION MANAGEMENT ASSIGNMENT – CALCULATIONS AND ASSUMPTIONS.

Support your answers as much as possible by showing all calculations and assumptions.

Assignment 1

 

 

Course: MBA Operations Management

 

Instructions

 

Support your answers as much as possible by showing all calculations and assumptions.

 

The assignment can cover material from the PPTs (chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

 

1. A manager of a company wants to evaluate if a new operations process they adopted last year has resulted in a 30% gain in productivity for the year. Employees went from servicing 400 customers to 500 customers in one year. Monthly training costs went from 3,000 AED to 5,000 AED for all employees. Employees were reduced from 20 to 18 in the year. The consulting fees to implement the change cost 50,000 AED for the year. Suppose each worker earned 8,000 AED/month and had an increase of 1,000 AED/month in the new process.

 

1. a) Evaluate the productivity using quantitative analysis (2 marks)
2. b) Analyze the validity of your answer in (a) by considering the issue of consistency in quality before and after the changes. (1 mark)

 

2. A company following a quick delivery, response strategy needs to select between 4 suppliers. It has chosen four comparative categories of interest: price, ease of cooperation, reliability of delivery time, and promised delivery time. These categories have been assigned weights of 10%, 20%, 20%, and 30%, respectively. The suppliers were scored on each of those factors (see table below) using a scale of 1-10, with a score of 1 meaning worst possible and 10 meaning best possible.

 

	Supplier A	Supplier B	Supplier C	Supplier D
Price	10	8	6	9
Ease of cooperation	5	5	6	8
Reliability of delivery time	4	9	9	5
Promised delivery time	5	8	4	7

 

1. Explain which supplier should be selected by making necessary calculations and discussing the strategy of the firm. (2 marks)
2. If clients of the firm would rather have reliable delivery times, would you change your selection in part a), why? (1 mark)

 

3. A quality analyst wants to construct a tool for measuring the average time of a process. She knows from past experience that the process standard deviation is 3 minutes. Each day last week, she randomly timed the process 5 times. The data from that activity appear below.

 

	Process times
Day	Timing 1	Timing 2	Timing 3	Timing 4	Timing 5
Monday	23	22	23	24	18
Tuesday	23	21	19	21	22
Wednesday	20	19	20	23	21
Thursday	17	19	20	19	23
Friday	16	20	25	20	16

 

1. a) By using 2-sigma for the control limits, propose a tool to monitor future average timings of the process and discuss if the process is in control. (2 marks)
2. b) Criticize the tool by discussing its shortcomings and how other tools can help to complement the tool in a). (1 mark)

 

4. You are to obtain three articles through Academic resources on one of the topics and industries below. You are first required to do the following:
5. a) Summarize the research contribution in ½ a page.
6. b) Critically explain how each research can be used for an operations management decision.

Topics:

• Product design
• Process design
• Quality design
• Capacity planning
• Layout design

Industry

• Health
• Mass Customization
• Import/Export
• Retail
• Manufacturing