What steps would you take to terminate an employee? Please explain your reasoning.
In: Operations Management
Answer the following questions. Show your calculations used to get the answer. If calculations are not provided, then you will not receive full credit for your answer.
Scenario 1: You have a project that is scheduled to be completed in 8 days at a budgeted cost of $200,000. At the end of day 5 you do an analysis and you determine the job is 70% complete and you have spent $130,000. At the end of day 5:
Scenario 2: You are the project manager of a project to install stone fireplaces at an new condo development. A total of 24 fireplaces are planned to be installed over a 4-month period. The total budget for the project is $144,000. The project is at the end of the 1st month and 5 fireplaces have been installed and $28,000 has been spent.
Scenario 3: A project has a PV of $65,000, an EV of $75,000 and an AC of $82,000.
Scenario 4: A project has a PV of $10,000, a SPI of 0.92 and a CPI of 0.90.
In: Operations Management
what kind of coverage strategy is appropriate for Nespresso ? Please draw the ideal channel structure of Nespresso.
In: Operations Management
In: Operations Management
Planning/writing reports and proposals-
A large manufacturing company's directors want you to find out why there is a considerable drop in the production units in the previous financial quarter. What will do to find out the cause of the problem and recommend a solution to the problem.
In: Operations Management
You’re a plant manager for a large company that manufactures food products, including yogurt, cereal, and granola bars (among others). Within this company, there are several factories spread across the United States and each produces one or two types of these products. You oversee many employees, but one, in particular, has caught your eye as a star performer. You decide you’d like to discuss her future with the company.
Explain how you would have this developmental conversation with the employees. What main areas should you cover? For each area, what should you be ready to discuss and what should the employee be ready to discuss?
In: Operations Management
A developer that specializes in compact urban amusement parks has formulated the following list of activities necessary to release a contract for the preparation of a new site. Times are given in weeks.
Estimated Immediate Activity Time
Activity Description Predecessors (weeks)
A Preliminary architectural design _ 14
B Community impact hearings A 2
C Line up potential financiers A 12
D Permit application A 5
E Negotiate com’ity impact details B 6
F Final Design B 8
G Loan approval C, F 3
H Permit hearings D 2
I Permit granting H 8
J Negotiate contract G, I 6
K Release contract E, J 3
Which activities are on the critical path
In: Operations Management
MURPHY WAREHOUSE COMPANY: Sustainable Logistics Richard Murphy Jr., the CEO of Murphy Warehouse Company, has spent a great deal of time analyzing sustainable ways to conserve resources, reduce costs, improve the well-being of his employees, and promote his company as an environmentally responsible logistics provider. Murphy also realizes that the benefits of sustainable projects must be weighed against the costs and payback periods of these investments. . • Richard Murphy Jr. is the CEO of Murphy Warehouse Company, a family-run company that began over 100 years ago. • He has responsibility to maintain the financial viability of the company that is now in its fourth generation of family ownership. • One of his biggest challenges is to understand how the company should adapt to a changing business environment while conserving the company’s financial resources and protecting the core business model that has sustained it for so long. • One major force in the current business environment is the sustainability movement, which focuses on the responsible use of natural resources. • Richard Murphy, you are trying to find the opportunities to adopt sustainable practices that also make financial sense to Murphy Warehouse Company. • He has successfully implemented several sustainable projects in his company • He is now faced with deciding to invest over a half million dollars in a stormwater project that presents an unusually long payback period. It is a complicated decision that involves high expense, multiple tangible and intangible variables, and a fair amount of risk that something might go wrong. What do you do? • One of Murphy’s biggest challenges is to understand how the company should adapt to a changing business environment, while conserving the company’s financial resources and protecting the core business model that has sustained it for so long. • A major force in the current business environment is sustainable (green) practices, which focuses on the responsible use of natural resources. • The case depicts Richard Murphy trying to find new opportunities to adopt sustainable practices that also make financial sense to MWC. One of the main goals of the case is to move away from the mindset that green practices are primarily for businesses who are willing to sacrifice sound financial decision making models to pursue ethical and moral imperatives to “do the right thing” for society and the environment. The case strives to show how sustainable practices can be part of running a business that can tout its environmental achievements while maximizing long-term profits. The case provides financial details on the conversion of lawn to prairie so you need to calculate a payback period that shows this project made financial sense 2 The lawn to prairie conversion also introduces several intangible and less quantifiable important benefits, including the reduction in the urban heat island effect, the attractive natural buffers between MWC and adjacent properties, and the attraction of wildlife to the area. Murphy has also gained a great deal of positive publicity for his prairie conversion project by sharing his experience at professional society meetings, local universities, and print media publications. Other projects at MWC that are described in the case provide further evidence that sustainable investments and profitability can go hand in hand. • The purchase of dock blankets • Upgrade in the lighting systems • Painting the ceilings white These are examples where green initiatives and disciplined financial decision making can be complementary. The decision point of the case-when Murphy is evaluating the feasibility of the stormwater project You need to evaluate the pros and cons of the stormwater project, considering both tangible and intangible factors. The payback period should be calculated, using the numbers provided in the case. Your team needs to discuss whether the significantly longer payback period can be justified (compared to traditional business practice and to previous projects at MWC). You need to show that sustainability is part of the “continuous improvement” management philosophy. You can see that the case demonstrates this by mentioning Richard Murphy’s explorations of new energy technologies in solar, wind, and geothermal. He seeks partnerships with local utilities and researches government incentive programs that enhance the financial returns for businesses that adopt green practices. Making sustainability part of on-going company culture and management practice is promoted by the USGBC, LEED, and ISO 14000 organizations, as described in the case. The case also mentions several times that sustainability practice is a necessary part of being a player in the competitive marketplace in terms of attracting clients and building positive public relations.
Can you please Recommend what steps should the CEO take?
In: Operations Management
1 The main legal sources of contract law.
2. The elements of a valid offer.
3. Ways an offer will be terminated.
4. Requirements for a valid restrictive covenant.
In: Operations Management
1. Mary Poppins mows her own yard to save money. Her neighbor Paul George hired a lawn service to mow his yard. One day Mary is looking out the window and sees Paul’s lawn service drive up and begin to mow her yard, not Paul’s. Mary thinks that is great and does not say anything to the lawn service while they mow the yard.The following week, Mary gets a bill from the lawn service. She calls the owner and says that she does not have to pay because there was no contract by which she agreed to have her yard mowed. Is the lawn service entitled to payment by Mary? Why?
2. On February 1, 2020, Jimmy Fallon sent an email to Stephen Colbert offering to pay Stephen $10,000 if he wears a Speedo bathing suit on his show. Stephen replied to the email that he accepted. On February 14th, Stephen wore a Speedo bathing suit on his show. On February 15th, Stephen told Jimmy to send him the money but Jimmy refused claiming that an email cannot be a valid contract. Who is right? Why?
In: Operations Management
Managing a business is stressful for both the leader and the employees. What time and stress management tactics would you implement?
In: Operations Management
Why is it important to be good manager of your time? How would this affect your ability to manage your time as a business owner?
In: Operations Management
The catering manager of LaVista Hotel, Lisa Ferguson, is disturbed by the amount of silverware she is losing every week. Last Friday night, when her crew tried to set up for a banquet for 500 people, they did not have enough knives. She decides she needs to order some more silverware, but wants to take advantage of any quantity discounts her vendor will offer.
follows≻For
a small order
(2,000
pieces or less) her vendor quotes a price of
$1.80/piece.
follows≻If
she orders
2,001
to
5,000
pieces, the price drops to
$1.60/piece.
follows > 5,001
to
10,000
pieces brings the price to
$1.40/piece,
and
follows≻ 10,001
and above reduces the price to
$1.25/piece.
Lisa's order costs are
$200
per order, her annual holding costs are
5%,
and the annual demand is
45,700
pieces. For the best option (the best option is the price level that results in an EOQ within the acceptable range):
a) What is the optimum ordering quantity?
nothing
units (round your response to the nearest whole number).
B) What is the annual holding cost? (round your response to two decimal places).
C) What is the annual ordering cost? (round your response to two decimal places).
D) What are the annual cost of the silverware with an optimal order quantity? (round your response to two decimal places).
E) What is the total annual cost, including ordering, holding, and purchasing the silverware? (round your response to two decimal places).
In: Operations Management
CASE:
Pandora is the Internet’s most successful subscription radio service. In May 2014, Pandora had 77 million registered users. Pandora accounts for over 9 percent of total U.S. radio listening hours. The music is delivered to users from a cloud server, and is not stored on user devices.
It’s easy to see why Pandora is so popular. Users are able to hear only the music they like. Each user selects a genre of music based on a favorite musician or vocalist, and a computer algorithm puts together a “personal radio station” that plays the music of the selected artist plus closely related music by different artists. The algorithm uses more than 450 factors to classify songs, such as the tempo and number of vocalists. These classifications, in conjunction with other signals from users, help Pandora’s algorithms select the next song to play.
People love Pandora, but the question is whether this popularity can be translated into profits. How can Pandora compete with other online music subscription services and online stations that have been making music available for free, sometimes without advertising? “Free” illegally downloaded music has also been a significant factor, as has been iTunes, charging 99 cents per song with no ad support. At the time of Pandora’s founding (2005), iTunes was already a roaring success.
Pandora’s first model was to give away 10 hours of free music and then ask subscribers to pay $36 per month for a year once they used up their 10 free hours. Result: 100,000 people listened to their 10 hours for free and then refused to pay for the annual service. Facing financial collapse, in November 2005 Pandora introduced an ad-supported option. In 2006, Pandora added a “Buy” button to each song being played and struck deals with Amazon, iTunes, and other online retail sites. Pandora now gets an affiliate fee for directing listeners to sites where users can buy the music. In 2008, Pandora added an iPhone app to allow users to sign up from their smartphones and listen all day if they wanted. Today, 70 percent of Pandora’s advertising revenue comes from mobile.
In late 2009 the company launched Pandora One, a premium service that offered no advertising, higher quality streaming music, a desktop app, and fewer usage limits. The service costs $4.99 per month. A very small percentage of Pandora listeners have opted to pay for music subscriptions, with the vast majority opting for the free service with ads. In fiscal 2013 Pandora’s total revenue was $427.1 million, of which $375.2 million (88 percent) came from advertising.
Pandora has been touted as a leading example of the “freemium” revenue model, in which a business gives away some services for free and relies on a small percentage of customers to pay for premium versions of the same service. If a market is very large, getting just 1 percent of that market to pay could be very lucrative— under certain circumstances. Although freemium is an efficient way of amassing a large group of potential customers, companies, including Pandora, have found that it is challenging to convert people enjoying the free service into customers willing to pay. A freemium model works best when a business incurs very low marginal cost, approaching zero, for each free user of its services, when a business can be supported by the percentage of customers willing to pay, and when there are other revenues like advertising fees that can make up for shortfalls in subscriber revenues.
In Pandora’s case, it appears that revenues will continue to come overwhelmingly from advertising, and management is not worried. For the past few years, management has considered ads as having much more revenue-generating potential than paid subscriptions and is not pushing the ad-free service. By continually refining its algorithms, Pandora is able to increase user listening hours substantially. The more time people spend with Pandora, the more opportunities there are for Pandora to deliver ads and generate ad revenue. The average Pandora user listens to 19 hours of music per month.
Pandora is now intensively mining the data collected about its users for clues about the kinds of ads most likely to engage them. Pandora collects data about listener preferences from direct feedback such as likes and dislikes (indicated by thumbs up or down on the Pandora site) and “skip this song” requests, as well as data about which device people are using to listen to Pandora music, such as mobile phones or desktop computers. Pandora uses these inputs to select songs people will want to stick around for, and listen to. Pandora has honed its algorithms so they can analyze billions more signals from users generated over billions of listening minutes per month.
As impressive as these numbers are, Pandora (along with other streaming subscription services) is still struggling to show a profit. There are infrastructure costs and royalties to pay for content from the music labels. Pandora’s royalty rates are less flexible than those of its competitor Spotify, which signed individual song royalty agreements with each record label. Pandora could be paying even higher rates when its current royalty contracts expire in 2015. About 61 percent of Pandora’s revenue is currently allocated to paying royalties. Advertising can only be leveraged so far, because users who opt for free ad-supported services generally do not tolerate heavy ad loads.
QUESTION:
For Pandora, what business strategies are being supported by the use of data mining? Explain your answer.
In: Operations Management
The plaintiff claims her copyrighted yoga class is being bent out of shape and she wants license fees paid up. The defendant claims yoga is an ancient practice and there is no one alive that can claim to own it. Please review the case below and answer the questions based on the case and your understanding of Intellectual Property.
In: Operations Management