For This and Any Other Courses,Assignments,
Disscussions,Quizes,Final Exams,Test Banks And Solution Manauals
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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