1. Consider the following processes that you frequently encounter as a college student. Describe each process and its input, activities, and outputs. What is being converted or transformed in each process? Who are the customers, suppliers, and stakeholders for each process?
Enrolling in classes
Taking a class
Buying a ticket for a play, concert, or basketball game
2. Why should metrics be regarded as primarily methods of communication? Think about the relationship between a metric, the strategy, and the task being carried out by an operations person.
3. A metric consists of three elements: the measure, the standard (what is expected), and the reward. Why are all three elements critical? What happens to the effectiveness of a metric when one of these three elements is missing?
4. Why is there a need for the four dimensions of the balanced scorecard?
5. Describe the various operations within an amusement park that need to have balanced capacity. Which operations are most likely to become a bottleneck? How might an amusement park utilize yield management to influence demand to better-fit available capacity?
6. What major differences would you expect to find in the management approaches used for breakthrough innovation projects versus those used for derivative or enhancement projects?
7. Some upscale restaurants have their kitchens visible to their customers changing the traditional view of front-office and back-office processes. What are the benefits and drawbacks to this approach?
8. Explain the different types of costs related to inventory planning.
9. While Taichi Ohno was impressed by certain aspects of the Ford Production System, he was bothered by other aspects. These included: large, special purpose equipment, a focused specialized workforce, and an ever driving emphasis on cost efficiency. Why are these aspects inconsistent with lean?
10. The Carry-on Luggage Company must set up an assembly line for a wheeled carry-on bag. Forecasts show that 60 units per hour should be produced. The tasks required, task times, and precedence relationships are as follows:
Task Time (seconds) Predecessors
A 30 –
B 50 A
C 25 A
D 10 B
E 25 B
F 15 B
G 10 C, E, F
H 30 D, G
Draw the precedence diagram.
What is the takt time?
What are the theoretical number of workstations?
11. Doog’s Donuts produces five varieties of pastries, which are sold to a national grocery chain: muffins, donuts, cookies, cream puffs, and fritters. Assuming that Doog’s operates a single shift for 1,800 hours per year, calculate the required capacity. The processing time per unit, setup time per lot, the annual demand, and lot size are given in the table. Assume that the times given are for a work cell of four workers each, so required capacity should be in terms of the number of work cells needed.
12. Electronics Assembly Inc. is a contract manufacturer that assembles consumer electronics for a number of companies. Currently, the operations manager is assessing the capacity requirements as input into a bid for a job to assemble cell phones for a major global company. The company would assemble three models of cell phones in the same assembly cell. Setup time between the phones is negligible. Electronics Assembly Inc. operates two 8-hour shifts for 275 days per year. Use the information in accompanying table to determine the capacity requirements.
Cell Phone Demand Forecast (phones/yr) Processing Time
(minutes/phone)
Mars 15,000 15
Saturn 8,000 18
Neptune 12,000 16
13. As the operations manager for Valley Kayaks (as described in the previous question), you find yourself faced with an interesting situation. Marketing has informed you that they have lost a number of sales because of a lack of inventory. Kayaks, being seasonal in nature, have to be in stock at your dealers if they are to be sold (customers are not willing to wait). The director of marketing proposes that you increase inventories by 25 percent (a major investment to you). She has also given the information in the following table. How would you assess this proposal from marketing? Would the projected change in ROA justify the inventory investment?
14. Four samples of three observations each have been taken, with actual measurements (in centimeters) shown below. Construct three sigma mean and range (X-bar and R) charts, and determine if corrective action is needed.
15. A service garage uses 120 boxes of cleaning cloths a year. The boxes cost $6 each. Ordering cost is $3 and holding cost is 10 percent of purchase cost per unit on an annual basis.
Determine:
(A) The economic order quantity
(B) The total cost of carrying the cloths (excluding purchase price)
(C) The average inventory
