Contrast a use case with a functional requirement. Provide one (1) example of each from the online bookstore project discussed in the online course content. Also, discuss the relationship between use-cases and functional requirements as part of your answer.

The Cardiff Carbon Fiber factory consists of four sequential steps that process many types of carbon fiber tubing for customers. All products must go through each of the four stations in order. Setups are required when a station is changed over from one batch of tubes to another. Production planners decide on the number of units in a batch. The setup for an item at a station cannot be carried out until a batch of that item is ready for processing at that station. After the setup, each unit in the batch is processed in the time indicated in the table below. So, for example, if the batch size is 9 units, the time to complete a batch at Station B would be 45 minutes for the setup, plus 36 minutes for processing (4 minutes per unit times 9 units) – for a total of 81 minutes. Units in a batch are carried together from one station to the next. You may assume that the transit time from one station to the next is essentially zero. Times in the table below are in minutes. There is one worker per station. The demand rate is 8 units per hour. You can ignore any startup or shutdown times. In other words, use long run averages.

Assume the factory uses batch sizes of 20 units.

1. What is the capacity of each station, measured in batches per hour? In other words, how many batches per hour could each station make?

2. What is the capacity of each station, measured in units per hour?

3. Which station is the bottleneck?

4. What is the capacity of the facility in units per hour?

5. What is the flow rate of the facility in units per hour, and what are the utilizations of each station?

6. If the factory decided to use batch sizes of 10 units, what would be the capacity of each station, measured in units per hour?

7. Which station would be the bottleneck?

8. What would be the flow rate of the facility in units per hour, and what would be the utilizations of each station?

As an aspiring entrepreneur, discuss how you’ll launch your business on the Web in a potential foreign market considering the social cultural factors.

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.

CASE QUESTION:

What type of e-commerce is Pandora? What is Pandora’s ecommerce business model? Explain your answer?

A building material business is operating in the north country. It has a 60,000 square feet warehouse. If more storage space is required then the business uses public warehouse for rent. The monthly inventory turnover ratio for the business is 3. The warehouse has 50% of the floor area as aisles space and operates at 70% of capacity utilization factor due to seasonality in demand. Typical product density of building materials is: 0.5 cubic feet per pound, the materials are stored in 16 ft high stacks. The warehouse incurs fixed expenses of $0.375 per square feet per month and a variable expense of $0.05 per lb of throughput. The rental option costs $0.10 per lb of storage per month and an in-and-out handling cost of $0.07 per lb. Find the expenses of the warehouse for a monthly throughput of 2,395,000 lbs.

While trying to expand a Housing Company into the Canadian market, respond the following questions:

1.What type of other problems (e.g., communication-and/or negotiation-related) can be encountered in this attempt? Explain.

2.Did the top management team find the formulation or the implementation process more difficult? Why?

If you were a manager, would you prefer to apply Theory X or Theory Y? Which managerial style is appropriate for the survival of the organizations?

Development of websites WHY DO COMPANIES OUTSOURCE IT TECH TECHS TO DEVELOP THEIR WEBSITES?

Is it better for organizations to be open and transparent to their workers? If so, why?

discuss the positive and negative potential health effects of global warming.

C & S Department Store is the second largest clothing and retail store chain in Jamaica. At present, they have 5 clothing and retail stores in all 14 parishes and are planning to expand to 7 stores per parish in the next 3 years. C & S Department Store has a centralized Human Resource Department located at its main office in Kingston. Unfortunately, although the HR processes are managed centrally, there are many HR tasks, policies and procedures that are controlled by the clothing and retail store managers or by the lead parish manger in each parish. Currently, the HR management processes are using Excel spreadsheet to compile reports from various parish Headquarters and stores. This task is being performed by a team of HR executives at its main office in Kingston.

Simone Coram is the Senior HR Manager of C & S Department Store and has discovered various administrative and HR issues with the clothing and retail store sites. Due to high focus on sales revenue and stores profitability, Retail Store Managers have difficulties in managing the stores in the areas of staff attendance, discipline and critical HR practices.

The fundamental emphasis and foundation of C & S Department Store has been centered on always maintaining the highest standards of customer service and for that reason they are in direct contact with customers at each and every Department Store. What sets C & S Department apart is a commitment to exceeding expectations making it one of their unique selling points. Giving excellent customer service is one of the main reasons why their customers choose C & S Department Store and why they keep coming back.

Imperatively, the entity’s strategy is purposed towards employing the ideal candidate for both their part-time and full-time sales associates with the capacity and proficiency to grow and hone their skills for prospective advanced position within the organization. Presently, the store managers for three (3) of C&S Department Store have made the announcement that they plan to retire within the next 18 to 24 month. These three managers have insisted that they will not remain in their position beyond this particular point.

A team of HR internal auditors has conducted a study and identified that there are irregularities in the staff attendance data both at the retail stores and regional offices. Sometimes many of the staff did not sign the attendance register or signed intermittently. During the HR audit, it was discovered that some staff signed the attendance register only at the end of the day. Further, sometimes staff signed the register and then left their post. There was also no mechanism to track the leave data of employees. Employees did not know their exact leave data. At the end of the year it was revealed that some employees have taken excess leave while some employees worked incessantly, creating frustration among staff.

There was also no standardization in the reports between head office, regional offices and the retail stores and this created discrepancies. HR provided a set of excel sheets and paper-based forms to help store managers maintain data. However, many store managers used and made unique formats of reports making it difficult to collate the reports. The data thus collated had to be verified over again and again, as there was a tendency for errors to emerge.

This discrepancy has caused a significant issue in salary. HR and attendance data were used to generate data for payroll. As there were many discrepancies in HR data and reports, this created several salary discrepancies and caused numerous issues among the employees, thus lowering employee satisfaction rate and affecting the employee morale.

Training and communication have become a major issue at C & S Department Store. As the company was growing at a fast pace, training employees on various HR procedures and policies was becoming increasingly difficult. Thus line managers took decisions based on their previous experience or personal insights and created unnecessary hassles that required HR intervention.

The staff turnover in two (2) key departments of Marketing and Accounts was running at 90%. Estimated cost of staff turnover - including overtime, loss of revenue, loss of skills, training time and management time to replace a staff member – is equivalent to approximately $3,000 per position thus costing the business around $500,000 per year.

Human Resource Management focuses on matching the needs of the business with the needs and development of employees and as such you are required to answer the following questions based on the scenario represented above.

1. The staff complains that there is a need for training for managers at C&S Department Store. Do you agree/disagree? How would you determine whether training is needed? Discuss the training methods that you would utilize in training managers, if you would undertake this intervention.

1. A method of comparing job worth that uses broad written descriptions and definitions to place jobs into "levels" is:

Job classification

Point factor

Factor comparison

Job ranking

2.

What is the first step in the training process?

Group of answer choices

Select appropriate training methods

Determine specific training needs

Determine training learning objectives

Evaluate transfer of training

3.

Financial compensation, benefits, and non-financial compensation like appreciation together make up __________.

Group of answer choices

non-discretionary compensation

indirect compensation

full compensation

total compensation

4.

In manufacturing firms where work is organized around teams, it is common for employees to be paid more as they learn how to do different jobs within the team. Tying pay to the ability to do different jobs is an example of __________.

Group of answer choices

commission pay

lump sum pay

merit pay

skill-based pay

5.

Pay mix refers to:

Group of answer choices

The difference between the highest and lowest paid employees in the company

The extent to which pay is spread out among employees in the same job

The way a person's total compensation is broken down into different types

The number of grades in a company's pay structure

what is the greatest future challenge to efforts to reduce tobacco use and what could be done to reduce these challenges?

How can a company incorporate organizational culture into their strategic plan

Why would culture be important when implementing a new change which is intended to meet one of their goals?