Prime cost worksheet (figure %, cost & sales to two decimal places)

Open and use the following chart below for the “prime cost” quiz. 10 questions for boxes A - J

Cost of sales + cost of Labor = Prime cost

Prime cost – cost of labor = cost of sales

Prime cost – cost of sales = cost of labor

Prime cost ÷ sales = prime cost %

Prime cost x PC% = Sales

Sales X PC% = prime cost

COST OF SALES	COST OF LABOR	PRIME COST	SALES	PRIME COST %
(A)	116,571.25	253,192.72	(B)	65.15%
82,317.54	89,994.45	(C)	283,850.50	(D)
736,780.23	(E)	1,511,023.48	2,497,560.95	(F)
(H)	2,439.23	(G)	6,420.75	72.99%
32,115.78	(I)	66,269.35	(J)	63.81%

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

Section C: Establishing Strategic Pay Plans
Case Study: Carter Cleaning Company – The New Pay Plan
Jennifer Carter graduated from State University in June 2011 and, after considering
several job offers, decided to do what she always planned to do—go into business
with her father, Jack Carter. Jack Carter opened his first laundromat in 1999 and his
second in 2001. The main attraction of these coin laundry businesses for him was
that they were capital—rather than labor—intensive. Thus, once the investment in
machinery was made, the stores could be run with just one unskilled attendant and
none of the labor problems people normally expects from being in the retail service
business.
The attractiveness of operating with virtually no skilled labor not-withstanding, Jack
had decided by 2007 to expand the services in each of his stores to include the dry
cleaning and pressing of clothes. He embarked, in other words, on a strategy of
“related diversification” by adding new services that were related to and consistent
with his existing coin laundry activities. He added these for several reasons. He
wanted to better utilize the unused space in the rather large stores he currently had
under lease. Furthermore, he was, as he put it, “tired of sending out the dry cleaning
and pressing work that came in from our coin laundry clients to a dry cleaner 5 miles
away, who then took most of what should have been our profits.” To reflect the new,
expanded line of services, he renamed each of his two stores Carter Cleaning Centers
and was sufficiently satisfied with their performance to open four more of the same
type of stores over the next 5 years. Each store had its own on-site manager and, on
average, about seven employees and annual revenues of about $550,000. It was this
six-store chain that Jennifer joined after graduating.
Her understanding with her father was that she would serve as a troubleshooter or
consultant to the elder Carter with the aim of both learning the business and bringing
to it modern management concepts and techniques for solving the business’s
problems and facilitating its growth.
Carter Cleaning Centers does not have a formal wage structure nor does it have rate
ranges or use compensable factors. Wage rates are based mostly on those prevailing
in the surrounding community and are tempered with an attempt on the part of Jack
Carter to maintain some semblance of equity between what workers with different
responsibilities in the stores are paid. Carter does not make any formal surveys when
determining what his company should pay. He peruses the want ads almost every day
Page 4
and conducts informal surveys among his friends in the local chapter of the laundry
and cleaners trade association. While Jack has taken an informal approach to paying
employees, his salary schedule has been guided by several basic pay policies based on
his intuition and experience. Although many of his colleagues adhere to a policy of
paying minimum rates, Jack has always followed a policy of paying his employees
about 10% above what he feels are the prevailing rates, a policy that he believes
reduces turnover while fostering employee loyalty. Of somewhat more concern to
Jennifer is her father’s informal policy of paying men about 20% more than women
for the same job. Her father’s explanation is, “They’re stronger and can work harder
for longer hours, and besides they all have families to support.”
C-1. Is the company at the point where it should be setting up a formal salary
structure based on a complete job evaluation? Why? Describe a job evaluation
method that the company can use.
C-2. Is Jack Carter’s policy of paying 10% more than the prevailing rates a sound one,
and how could that be determined? What type of equity issues is Carter addressing?

C-3. Similarly, is Carter’s male–female differential wise? If not, why not?
C-4. Specifically, what would you suggest Jennifer do now with respect to her
company’s pay plan?

Kristin has decided to start a new business of baking and selling cookies to order and cater to the university students on campus when they study in the evenings and stay up till after midnight. She has named her business Cookie Cult. The following is the list of tasks she came up with for completing one cycle of cookie production. After a car arrives; inspector checks paper work and sets up machine Inspector collects payment for the service Inspector checks emission data and prepares report Machines collects exhaust emission data Task Preceding Tasks Time (seconds) A - Receive order - 30 B - Clean equipment from previous run A 40 C - Program mixer A 15 D - Mixer produces the cookie mix B, C 60 E - Prepare baking tray for oven D 20 F - Program oven D 15 G - Oven bakes cookie E, F 50 H - Cool and box cookies G 30 I - Accept payment and deliver cookies H 20 On a typical evening (5 PM to 2AM), Cookie Cult expects to receive and fulfil 400 such orders. Kristin wants to set up an assembly-like system to meet this demand. Your job is to help her set up and balance the assembly line in order to facilitate a fast-paced production. Kristen’s employees may still perform manual work at various stages of the process but assume there are enough skilled employees on hand. a) Draw a precedence diagram of the tasks. (7 points) b) What is the workstation cycle time? (7 points) c) What is theoretical minimum number of workstations? (7 point) d) Balance the assembly line using the “shortest task time” as the primary rule.

Profit and Loss Worksheet - (Figure %’s to 2 decimal places)

Cost of sales

Open and use the chart below for the Cost of Sales Quiz. 7 questions A – G

Cost of sales ÷ sales = cost of sale %

Sales × cost of sale % = cost of sales

Cost of sales ÷ Cost % = Sales

Cost of food sales 256,820.32	Food Sales 802,562.50	Cost of Food % (A)
Cost of Beer Sales (B)	Beer Sales 32,505.00	Cost of Beer % 27.50 %
Cost of Wine Sales 12,465.00	Wine Sales (C)	Cost of Wine % 28.5 %
Cost of Liquor Sales 8,121.13	Liquor Sales 36,914.25	Cost of Liquor % (D)
Total Cost of Goods (ADD Food,beer,wine, and liquor costs) (E)	Total Sales (ADD food,beer,wine and liquor sales) (F)	Total Cost of Goods Sold % (figure Total cost of Goods) (G)

A.

B.

C.

D.

E.

F.

G.

Please read case and answer the questions thank you.

Voice-controlled devices and utilities are growing more popular as smartphone and cloud technology become more robust. Apple’s Siri, Android’s Google Now, and Windows’ Cortana digital assistants are all powered by voice recognition, and Amazon entered the fray with voice controls for its Amazon Fire TV technology. Amazon’s latest voice-controlled technology offering, the Amazon Echo Bluetooth speaker and virtual home assistant, raises the stakes even further. Echo was released in 2015 to mixed but mostly positive reviews, which emphasized the future potential of the device. Amazon Prime members could buy Echo for just $99, while normal Amazon customers had to pay $199.Currently, Echo’s functionality is simplistic, but useful. The device is always on, but requires its ‘wake word’ to prime it for interaction – the only two choices are “Alexa” or “Amazon” at the moment. You can ask Echo questions, have it play music, create a to-do list, or get the weather. Echo can also play a digest of the biggest news stories or play reports of specific issues that users ask to hear. The Echo companion app allows you to customize settings, keep a record of your queries and the answers to those queries, and view the shopping and to-do list items that you’ve previously dictated to Echo. Amazon is also developing a developers’ kit to allow developers to create Echo apps, which are likely to make it even more multi-functional in the future.Echo is a move by Amazon to enter the voice-controlled technology space, but it also has potential as a “smart home” appliance, which is a growing market. Echo might someday be able to integrate with your home appliances, adjusting the temperature, locking and unlocking doors, and turning lights on and off. Amazon might envision a future where Echo is a kind of “hub” where you can manage and connect with all of the smart appliances in your home in one centralized location.Echo lacks a battery option and has to be plugged in to function, limiting its portability. It’s also able to glean information from Wikipedia, but not from Google or other search engines. That will likely change in the future as both Amazon and Echo’s developers gain more familiarity with the device. The speaker quality is also limited, with testers reporting distortion at higher volumes. Users report that Echo experiences some confusion with queries that don’t fall within its narrowly defined specifications, although Echo also learns from its mistakes and adapts to the types of queries you most frequently make.It’s not currently clear how Amazon uses the information it gleans from users’ questions and commands, or whether there’s any capacity for storing things you say that aren’t directed at Echo itself. From Amazon’s perspective, the Echo could be an invaluable new tool for learning more about its customers, with an ability to generate heaps of granular data about the routines and preferences of each individual user.On the other hand, privacy advocates have ample reason to be concerned about a device that can quickly transmit your every word to the cloud, where it can be stored along with the rest of Amazon’s trove of your personal information and used to make product recommendations and generate marketing materials. However, Amazon notes that any users uncomfortable with the collection of their data can simply go into their “History” using their Echo app, and delete queries either individually or in bulk, which will also delete the information from Amazon’s servers.At this point, there’s no telling what the Amazon Echo of 2020 will look like compared to the launch version of 2015. It could be a staple in homes across the country, or it could flame out like the Amazon Fire phone long before then. Amazon seems poised to commit the necessary resources to ensure the former.

1. What functionality does Amazon Echo display during the video?

2. What kind of technology does Amazon Echo use?

3. Why does Amazon Echo make sense as a hub for home appliance automation?

4.What might be some privacy concerns involving Echo? Are these well founded? Why or why not?

5. Why is releasing a developers’ kit for Echo important for Amazon to keep pace with services offered by Apple, Google, and Microsoft?

Shonga PLC produces tables. According to the forecasts, there will be demand for 200 tables during the next four weeks and 250 from week 5 to week 8, but costumers have previously ordered 210, 80 40, and 70 pieces for the first four weeks. We also know that we have an on-hand inventory of 400 tables, order policy contains 200 units and lead time is 1 week. Develop the Master Plan Schedule.

MARKETING RESEARCH

The principal activity of General Mills is to produce and market packaged consumer food products. The products include cereals, desserts, flour and baking mixes, dinner and side dish products, organic products, snacks, beverages and yogurt products. The products are sold under the brand names namely: Cheerios, Wheaties, Lucky Charms, Total, Chex, Pillsbury, Haagen-Dazs, Betty Crocker and Bugles. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. is one of the major customers of the Group. As of 2005, the company operated in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe and Asia/Pacific.

In order to determine the impact of an important strategic move, such as lowering prices or introducing new products, General Mills uses marketing research. General Mills ran into problems when a pesticide panic hurt sales and private label makers started to cut into their market share. Store brands have become increasingly popular with consumers. Store owners took advantage of cereal prices of up to $5 per box, resulting in increased market share for the store brands. At least one cereal maker, Quaker Oats, started making a house brand version of its cereal. Quaker’s lower priced-bagged-copies of leading brands have grown rapidly and advanced Quaker’s market share to over 10%. Ralcorp Holdings Inc., the leading maker of private label cereals, expects the trend of house or private brands gaining increased market share to continue, since only about half of the leading cereals have private label competition. Ralcorp expects to gain a larger portion of the market as it continues to introduce more imitations. Some industry experts believe that unless the big brand name cereal prices are cut, or the promotions increased, this trend will continue.

In order to address this problem, General Mills conducted problem solving research to determine what, if any changes they should make to their price and promotions strategy. In order to determine the effects of changes, consumer surveys were undertaken followed by test marketing. The results of General Mills test markets suggested several pricing and promotional changes that would help increase their success. General Mills cut prices on several of its cereal lines. Along with this price reduction, General Mills cut its coupon and promotion budget in an effort to halt spiraling costs and to reduce the price gap between General Mills’ products and the competition, which had been as high as 25% in the past.   

In addition to lowering prices, General Mills launched sweetened cereals to capture the aging baby boomer market. In January 2005, the company introduced Fiber One Honey Clusters, which has slightly sweetened flakes instead of the original Fiber One’s fiber twigs. This introduction was based on the belief that if a product does not taste good, it does not matter what the nutritional benefits are. It is not going to be a success. The sweetened cereals have also helped to insulate General Mills from price competition. Private labels are less likely to knock off the sweetened brands, either because they are too narrowly targeted at market niches or because store labels cannot compete with the hefty marketing budget of General Mills. These moves have increased General Mills’ sales and profits. The strategy of consistently low prices and introducing niche products, supported by marketing research, is paying high dividends for General Mills.

Questions

1. In its attempt to perform descriptive research design, what type(s) of survey and observation methods do you recommend to be used by General Mills in order to determine their pricing and promotional strategies needed to face private labels. ( 20 points - 250 words approx.)

ASAP PLEASE!!

MARKETING RESEARCH

The principal activity of General Mills is to produce and market packaged consumer food products. The products include cereals, desserts, flour and baking mixes, dinner and side dish products, organic products, snacks, beverages and yogurt products. The products are sold under the brand names namely: Cheerios, Wheaties, Lucky Charms, Total, Chex, Pillsbury, Haagen-Dazs, Betty Crocker and Bugles. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. is one of the major customers of the Group. As of 2005, the company operated in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe and Asia/Pacific.

In order to determine the impact of an important strategic move, such as lowering prices or introducing new products, General Mills uses marketing research. General Mills ran into problems when a pesticide panic hurt sales and private label makers started to cut into their market share. Store brands have become increasingly popular with consumers. Store owners took advantage of cereal prices of up to $5 per box, resulting in increased market share for the store brands. At least one cereal maker, Quaker Oats, started making a house brand version of its cereal. Quaker’s lower priced-bagged-copies of leading brands have grown rapidly and advanced Quaker’s market share to over 10%. Ralcorp Holdings Inc., the leading maker of private label cereals, expects the trend of house or private brands gaining increased market share to continue, since only about half of the leading cereals have private label competition. Ralcorp expects to gain a larger portion of the market as it continues to introduce more imitations. Some industry experts believe that unless the big brand name cereal prices are cut, or the promotions increased, this trend will continue.

In order to address this problem, General Mills conducted problem solving research to determine what, if any changes they should make to their price and promotions strategy. In order to determine the effects of changes, consumer surveys were undertaken followed by test marketing. The results of General Mills test markets suggested several pricing and promotional changes that would help increase their success. General Mills cut prices on several of its cereal lines. Along with this price reduction, General Mills cut its coupon and promotion budget in an effort to halt spiraling costs and to reduce the price gap between General Mills’ products and the competition, which had been as high as 25% in the past.   

In addition to lowering prices, General Mills launched sweetened cereals to capture the aging baby boomer market. In January 2005, the company introduced Fiber One Honey Clusters, which has slightly sweetened flakes instead of the original Fiber One’s fiber twigs. This introduction was based on the belief that if a product does not taste good, it does not matter what the nutritional benefits are. It is not going to be a success. The sweetened cereals have also helped to insulate General Mills from price competition. Private labels are less likely to knock off the sweetened brands, either because they are too narrowly targeted at market niches or because store labels cannot compete with the hefty marketing budget of General Mills. These moves have increased General Mills’ sales and profits. The strategy of consistently low prices and introducing niche products, supported by marketing research, is paying high dividends for General Mills.

Questions

2.              If General Mills decides to conduct causal research to determine the effects of the "Fiber One Honey Clusters' flavor" on demand for cereals by baby boomers, what type of true experiments would you advise them to design? why and how? . (20 points -200 words approx.)

ASAP PLEASE!!!!

1. Jamison Day Consultants has been entrusted with the task of evaluating a business plan that has been divided into four sections?marketing, finance, operations, and human resources. Chris, Steve, Juana, and Rebecca form the evaluation team. Each of them has expertise in a certain field and tends to finish that section faster. The estimated times taken by each team member for each section have been outlined in the table below. Further information states that each of these individuals is paid $60 per hour.

	MARKETING	FINANCE	OPERATIONS	HR
Chris	80	120	125	140
Steve	20	115	145	160
Juana	40	100	85	45
Rebecca	65	35	25	75

Table 1: Times Taken by Team Members for Different Sections (minutes)

1. Assign each member to a different section such that Jamison Consultants’s overall cost is minimized.
2. What is the total cost of these assignments?

1. Note taking is an important academic task. What advice will you give students who do not write notes in class? Why?

2. Methods for making notes from reading are different from those from lectures. Mention FOUR methods of making notes from reading ?

3. What does setting a priority mean? Give an Example.

4.STUDY SKILLS can be viewed as four categories of skills. They are

You have just been appointed as an innovation manager in an ambitious medium-sized company designing and producing power tools (such as drills and saws). The company wants to promote breakthrough innovation. One of your first tasks is to think about innovation performance metrics to use. What advice will you give to the CEO regarding the metrics?

Please read and answer questions

Freshdesk is a cloud-based platform that offers Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions for common customer service functions, such as automated handling of customer support tickets, maintenance of community forums, live chat support and phone support, and an automatically updated knowledge base that converts common customer service responses into permanent articles. Businesses sign up for one of several payment plans depending on their budgets and needs, ranging from as low as $15 per month to pricier plans for businesses with more significant customer service demands.Founded in 2010, Freshdesk has found a niche among companies requiring a customer support platform that could scale along with their growth. Along with competitors Zendesk and Salesforce.com’s Desk.com, Freshdesk has experienced rapid growth, reaching over 80,000 customers as of 2016. As an SaaS-based platform, Freshdesk realized that it made more sense to move its own operations to the cloud than to invest heavily in its own in-house infrastructure. So while thousands of companies are now relying on Freshdesk for their customer service software, Freshdesk itself relies on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to house its software platform.When Amazon revamped its retail computing infrastructure over the course of several years starting in 2003, it also had the idea to sell access to its virtual servers to other companiesin need of computing power. Today, AWS has grown far beyond that initial idea, offering a full suite of remote computing services that are distributed across 11 geographical regions across the world to maximize availability and speed. AWS data and applications are stored redundantly in multiple regions to ensure uninterrupted uptime. The most well known AWSservice is the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which offers virtual computing power to customers to run their own computer applications. Customers pay by the hour for the computing power they use and select the geographical location that optimizes speed. Amazon’s own flagship retail website is also housed on EC2 and is fully powered by other AWS services. AWS also includes products for databases, networking, security, analytics, mobile services, deployment and management, enterprise applications, and more.When Freshdesk decided that it would use the cloud to power its software platform, it selected AWS over competing services like Google Compute Engine and Microsoft’s Windows Azure Virtual Machines. AWS appealed to Freshdesk because of its wide variety of services, its rapid scalability, and its pay-as-you-go payment plan. AWS Enterprise Support also helped Freshdesk minimize its costs further by picking the most efficient services for operating its platform. For Freshdesk, that meant Amazon Redshift database services and Amazon OpsWorks deployment and management services. Amazon Redshift is one of Amazon’s data warehouse services. The primary selling points of Redshift are its scalability, its ability to seamlessly integrate with all of the major business intelligence tools needed to run queries on and analyze the data it contains, and its built-in encryption feature. Building a data warehouse is a challenging task, requiring expensive.investment and in-house infrastructure and staff. Scaling the system to grow as the business grows is also challenging. Freshdesk preferred to use Redshift for its data warehousing needs for these reasons.As with the rest of AWS’ offerings, payment for Redshift is pay-as-you-go, with options to commit to full years of service for a discount. There are also options for type of storage. Dense Storage (DW1) nodes allow for very large data warehouses using hard disk drives. Dense Computer (DW2) nodes allow for higher performance with large amounts of RAM and solid- state disks. DW1 nodes are more cost-effective, but DW2 nodes are better for performance.Scaling is as easy as updating the number of nodes in your Redshift console.Redshift houses Freshdesk’s data, but Amazon OpsWorks manages its software applications, the cornerstone of Freshdesk’s business. OpsWorks is an application management service that allows companies to use Amazon’s computing resources to deploy and run their applications. Coding and operating applications is a complicated, time-intensive task. OpsWorks minimizes the effort required for Freshdesk to maintain its customer service applications. With OpsWorks, Freshdesk can use Amazon’s application servers and databases, and use simple tools to manage application deployment, software configurations, software package installations, and database setups.OpsWorks offers more convenience tool than other Amazon offerings like CloudFormation or EC2, at a cost of some customizability. But it also offers more customizability than Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk service, which is intended to simplify the application deployment process as much as possible. Freshdesk opted for OpsWorks to maintain control of its applications, while allowing Amazon to manage many of the tasks relating to the operation and deployment of the applications. An increasing number of businesses are turning to remote computing services on the cloud to reap benefits like these.

1. Why was Freshdesk a good candidate for remote computing services on the cloud?

2. What was Freshdesk’s experience working with AWS?

3. What made Amazon Redshift and OpsWorks good fits for Freshdesk?

A company is trying to reduce inventory by installing a kanban system for compressors on one of its assembly lines. The setup cost = $10, Annual holding cost per compressor is $100, Daily production is 200 compressors, Annual usage is 20000, The lead time is 3 days, safety stock is 12 day’s production of compressors. Determine the size of the kanban and the number of kanbans (containers) needed.

what are various Business environments that Hungry Lion operates in as they have an impact on the successful operation of the business?( 20 Marks)

Question 2 1 Point A manager is best described as a person who is responsible for ________.

accomplishing the organization's goals

communicating with stockholders

teaching new employees basic skills

delegating authority to subordinates

Question 3 1 Point Which of the following represents the five functions of planning, organizing, staffing, leading, and controlling?

management process strategic

management succession

planning adaptability

screening

Question 4 1 Point Which basic function of management includes developing rules and procedures?

planning

organizing

leading

staffing

Question 5 1 Point What specific activities listed below are part of the planning function?

developing rules and procedures

giving each subordinate a specific task

training and developing employees

establishing quality standards

Question 6 1 Point Which function of the management process includes delegating authority to subordinates and establishing channels of communication?

organizing

motivating

leading

staffing

Question 7 1 Point All of the following are activities performed within the staffing function of the management process EXCEPT ________.

recruiting employees

maintaining morale

evaluating performance providing

training

Question 8 1 Point In the management process, which activity is part of the staffing function?

evaluating performance

maintaining morale

developing rules

setting production levels