QUESTION a: is from Fiscal Administration 10 edition by John L. Mikesell

Set the property tax rate for each taxing unit. Report each rate in dollars per $100 of assessed value.

Central County includes five townships (Nixon, Reagan, Davis, Greasy Creek, Navaho) and one city (Booneville). It is served by two independent school districts: Seagram United (Davis and Greasy Creek Townships) and Yeltsin Consolidated Schools (Nixon, Reagan, and Navaho Townships). Each government in the county levies a property tax to finance its activities, although Booneville has also enacted a local earned income tax (it is expected to yield $750,000 in the next year). Property tax rates are applied to assessed value, defined to equal 50 percent fair cash value. Local unit tax rates fully overlap. The county assessor reports the following fair cash values for units within the county:

Nixon Township    $69,535,000

Reagan Township    $35,000,000

Davis Township    $23,720,000

Greasy Creek Township    $15,922,000

Navaho Township    $27,291,000

Booneville (Davis Township)    $88,450,000

Booneville (Greasy Creek Township)    $75,392,000

The township value data are for the area outside of any city or town that resides in the township. Values within a city must be added to obtain the township total. Planned Expenditure by Taxing Units The following presents the amounts that each taxing unit has budgeted to spend in the next year:

Central County    $3,428,000

Booneville City    $4,539,000

Nixon Township    $ 99,000

Reagan Township    $ 150,000

Davis Township    $ 250,000

Greasy Creek Township    $ 175,000

Navaho Township    $ 83,000

Seagram United Schools    $6,350,000

Clinton Consolidated Schools    $3,800,000

How can you best make use of digital marketing to enhance the impact of traditional marketing on your venture?

Your friend George is going to start a new business servicing and repairing cell phones. He asks you what is the difference in characteristics of a service business over manufacturing a product. Name and describe the four characteristics of services using his business as an example (often referred to as the 4I’s of service). Explain to him why this makes it a bit harder to market.

What is a marketing channel system and value network?can be use in Hypermarkets in Oman?

PROVIDE NOTES FOR EACH TOPIC

Inflation and investments.
Security Market Analysis.
Risk and Return in portfolio Management. Analysis of risk & return, concept of total risk, factors contributing to total risk,
systematic and unsystematic risk, Risk & risk aversion.
Diversification and Techniques of Risk
Reduction.

INTRODUCTION: The sun was setting and Arun Mittra was having the last sip of his coffee. He had not expected the day to start in such a strange fashion — and to say the least, the experience had not been very pleasant. The memories of that day kept rushing back and unsettled him more. That morning, the meeting had again started on an acrimonious note and had continued in the same vein until it was over. It was the same old story of choosing a vendor for the supply of one of the critical subassemblies for the assembly and manufacture of voltage stabilizers, the top product of A-CAT Corp. As Mittra noted, the way the manufacturing lead times are becoming the focal points with other manufacturers/competitors, A-CAT will be lucky if it survives the onslaught with their labored, never ending decision-making process. BACKGROUND: Vendor selection and management was always a tricky issue for A-CAT, and it always upset Mittra, vice president of A-CAT Corp. There were many contradictions and it was always a bone of contention between various departments within the organization. Purchasing, Finance, Manufacturing, Quality, and Sales and Service, became part of the discussion. There were four prominent suppliers vying for the contract, which was usually given on the basis of supply history, delivery promptness, quality, cost, salvage policy and intangible goodwill. THE COMPANY: A-CAT Corp. (A-CAT) was one of the leading producers of electrical appliances. It was a mid-sized manufacturer and distributor of domestic electrical appliances, and largely catered to the price-sensitive rural population. The company owned and operated two medium-sized manufacturing units in a sleepy town called Gondia, in one of the remote districts in Vidarbha, ironically a backward region in the most progressive state of India, Maharashtra. A-CAT had an alliance partnership with Jupiter Inc. for the production of cabinets and had a collaborative venture with Global Electricals for manufacturing TV signal boosters and battery chargers. A-CAT’s manufacturing units had been in operation since 1986. The budget year 2010-2011 showed annual sales of $9,800,000 and employed about 40 or more employees. The voltage regulators manufactured by A-CAT were used for many different purposes, although the focus was on its flagship product, VR500, a voltage regulator of 500 volt-amperes specifically used in households as a protective device for refrigerators and television sets, so as to protect the latter from the vagaries of load fluctuations and/or frequent power failures, which were very common phenomena in this backward region of Vidarbha. The primary functional departments of A-CAT were its Purchasing Department, Design Department, Manufacturing Department and Sales/Service departments. Rather than compete with the large-scale operations prevalent in similar types of industry, A-CAT preferred to focus on the rural segment. It offered nearly 100 different models of various electrical appliances for household use, including TV signal boosters, transformers, FM radio kits, electronic ballasts, battery chargers and voltage regulators. The broad range of products catered to the rural population, thus sticking to A-CAT’s policy of catering to the low end of the market segment in and around Vidarbha. The low end refers to the customers who were quite sensitive towards pricing. In the opinion of top-level management, there was more opportunity in this segment of the market, and management had been proved right. THE ISSUE: In choosing an important component (transformer) for A-CAT’s voltage regulator VR500, the objective was to choose the best supplier. The company decided to consider efficiency, power factor, losses, turn ratio and cost. Out of these five criteria, the first three lent themselves only to qualitative comparison, while for the last two criteria, quantitative information was easily available. Over the years, A-CAT had been relying on four major suppliers of transformers, and these had the brand names Ideal, Dolphin, Boss and Freedom. The company always knew with its focus on only these four vendors that it was missing out on opportunities to explore other options. It was also aware that these were by no means the only feasible ones, but to keep decision making to a less complex level, it arbitrarily decided to compare only these four. The decision making, though quantitative in nature, involved a lot of qualitative options and hence a lot of subjectivity. The consensus ranking, along with one-on-one comparison data, was available to the group of decision makers, as the performance of each brand under various criteria was on record, but the problem the whole group faced was how to make a rational and comprehensive framework for structuring the decision problem. Though the data was not concrete in nature, the comparative evaluations were thrashed out through deliberations and discussions. And the most notable and at the same time surprising aspect was that everyone seemed to agree with the process. In order to bring in their judgments about various criteria in the hierarchy, decision makers compared the criteria in a pair-wise manner. The need was to decide which one of the criteria was more important than the others in selecting the best transformer. The decision had to be made and priorities had to be set as to which criterion was more important for A-CAT in achieving its objective, and how much more important it was than the other criteria. The company had plenty of available data to fall back on (see Exhibits 1 to 3), but it was still not sure how best to utilize it and prepare an action plan. The company needed an approach to take decision making to the next level. It was aware of certain methodologies that helped to improve the decision-making process; it was not the lack of knowledge regarding the tools that was hampering the decision making, but the experience in applying the tools. THE OBJECTIVE: To select the best transformer brand/model for VR500 (out of the available alternatives). • Four Alternatives: Dolphin, Ideal, Boss, and Freedom • Four Criteria for Selection: 1- Efficiency, 2-Power, 3-Losses, 4-Cost. • Scale of pair-wise comparison: 1 - 3 - 5 - 7 – 9.  1 - Equal importance: Two elements contribute equally to the objective.  3 - Moderate importance: Experience and judgment slightly favor one element over the other.  5 - Strong importance: Experience and judgment strongly favor one element over the other.  7 - Very strong importance: One element is favored strongly over the other; its dominance is demonstrated in practice.  9 - Extreme importance: Evidence favoring one element over the other is of the highest possible order of affirmation. THE DECISION: The situation called for something out-of-the-box, as the important elements of the decisions were difficult to quantify or compare, and also the communication among the team members was impeded by their different perspectives. The aim was to judge all the alternatives without any prejudices and biases. Mittra knew that, being human, there was always a chance of being swayed by extraneous considerations — we all have our predilections and this plays a great part in our decisions, which are always thought of as rational by those making them. It was more or less clear to all concerned that there were lot of issues involved, and this would bring to the fore a lot of frayed tempers and bloated egos, and to end it all A-CAT had to do something about it. The decision making had to be formulated in a manner in which all concerned got their say, and the decision had to be taken without compromising the objectivity of the process. Wriggling out of the situation was very difficult and seemed almost impossible; all the functional departments were working at cross purposes and were seen to be almost at loggerheads. The perception always varied and day by day it was becoming very difficult to make a decision in favor of one or the other supplier without annoying one functional department or another. Not satisfied with the answers and solutions, Mittra decided to take a collective view. To make it really collaborative, he asked the group of decision makers to postpone the decision until they arrived at what they thought was the correct decision. Since they were on an unending rollercoaster ride of arguments and counter-arguments, Mittra put his foot down and asked the warring factions in the group to come up with some quantitative way of dealing with the issue at hand.

1. Rate Arun Mittra as a (Corporate) leader.  List any strong and weak points
2. Discuss the current decision-making process at A-CAT.  Evaluate it’s; Complexity, Effectiveness and Accuracy.
3. Suggest ways to improve A-CAT’s decision-making process.  Make specific recommendations to improve the process.
4. Have the quality of the comparison tables used in this case study helped or hindered your ability to resolve this case study? Why?
5. Do you agree or disagree with A-CAT’s decision, during this vendor selection process, to limit the number of potential vendors to four in order to simplify the process?  Explain your answer.

How could you apply the QFD technique in the develop of a new medical device? Explain with an example.

Organization Analysis " Thyssenkrupp Engineered Plastics ".

Process design: What is/are the transformation processes?

Organization Analysis " Thyssenkrupp Engineered Plastics "

Describe the quality assurance system and how it supports the corporate strategy.

What is a marketing channel system and value network can be used in Hypermarkets in GCC and in Oman a especially ?

A convenience store recently started to carry a new brand of soft drink. Management is interested in estimating future sales volume to determine whether it should continue to carry the new brand or replace it with another brand. The following table provides the number of cans sold per week. Use both the trend projection with regression and the exponential smoothing​ (let alpha α=0.4) with an initial forecast for week 1 of 569​) methods to forecast demand for week 13. Compare these methods by using the mean absolute deviation and mean absolute percent error performance criteria. Does your analysis suggest that sales are trending and if​ so, by how​ much?

Period   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12
Sales   569   615   645   742   640   606   732   718   713   690   678   738
Observation   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12

(i) Obtain the trend projection with regression forecast.

The forecast for week 13 is

Week 13 corresponds to t=13. Obtain the forecast for the next week by substituting t=13 into the regression equation.

​(ii) Now obtain the exponential smoothing forecast.

The exponential smoothing method is a weighted moving average method that calculates the average of a time series by giving recent demands more weight than earlier demands. The equation for the forecast​ is:

Ft+1=α(Demand this period)+(1−α)(Forecast calculated last period)=αDt+(1−α)Ft.

Please, I need answers for 2 questions, thank you.

Project Management in Practice South African Repair Success through Teamwork

When a fire broke out in the carbonate regeneration column in a major facility of Sasol, a leading South African coal, chemical, and crude-oil company, it was crucial to get it fixed immediately. It was deter- mined that the damaged portion of the 19-foot-wide, 231-foot-long column would have to be cut out and replaced before the facility could operate again. Time was of the essence, and only 40 days were allowed for the repair project. To achieve this unheard-of schedule, a number of special ground rules were established: • The project is to be schedule-driven, not cost-driven • There is no float anywhere on the project • Always plan to reduce scheduled times, not meet them • Resources are not to be considered as a limitation • Communication will be continuous across all levels • Safety will not be compromised • Quality will not be compromised In addition, special effort was directed toward making the project team strive to reduce time on the project. First, it was made clear that a higher premium would be placed on team performance than on individual performance. The “soft” aspects of management were always taken into consideration: making sure transport was available, accommodations were acceptable, food was available, excessive over- time was avoided, communication forms matched each member’s preferences (verbal, phone, written, etc.), and so on. A communication board was installed and updated twice daily to communicate project progress, and especially time saved on the schedule with the person’s name who achieved it. There were both twice-daily shift change meetings, where each shift communicated with the previous shift about progress and problems, and twicedaily planning meetings where the work activities of the next two days were planned in minute detail. The response to this level of project team attention was overwhelming. People raised ideas for saving even five minutes on the schedule. Enthusiasm for the project, and saving project time, became the dominant culture. As a result, the project was completed in only 25 days, 15 days early, with a corresponding cost savings of over $21 million out of an $85 million budget.

1. What are the main lessons learned from reading this case?

2. What does it mean ‘soft’ aspects of management

A drug store was going to open on the corner of a busy street downtown in the next three months. Before it opened its doors it needed to secure merchandise to sell to customers. It determined that it would need to stock its shelves with toiletries on a regular basis. The store had the storage capacity to hold excess inventory. When the drug store approaches a company that supplies toiletries, which type of discount would be a fitting discount for the store to use?