A food processor uses approximately 27,000 glass jars a month for its fruit juice product. Each jar costs $10.8. Because of storage limitations, a lot size of 4,000 jars has been used. Annual holding cost is 20% of a jar’s price, and reordering cost is $60 per order.

The company operates an average of 20 days a month.

Answer the following questions, showing calculation steps:

How many times a year an order size of 4000 is placed?

What is the total cost of Q=4000? (Include ordering, holding and purchase cost)

What is optimal order quantity and its total cost?

What penalty is the company incurring by its present order size?

The manager would prefer ordering 10 times each month but would have to justify any change in order size. One possibility is to simplify order processing to reduce the ordering cost. What ordering cost would enable the manager to justify ordering every other day (i.e., 10 times a month)?

Given the discount offers, would you change your order size from your EOQ level and Why? Show all the steps.

why do you think that organizational structure will have an impact on how risks are assessed?

What schedule-predecessor types are the most common? Have you used any? Share an experience.

2-3 paragraph response. Can you think of an example of an informational ad? What information is provided, and how does it persuade consumers? Can you think of an example of a branding ad? What personality and attitude are attached to the product? How might those characteristics persuade consumers?

List and define some of the costs of quality. ​

You work for an MNE that makes and markets cellular telephones. Senior managers want to begin selling the phones in Latin America. To pursue a transnational strategy, management wants to minimize adaptation of the phones. They have asked you for a briefing.

Your Task: Focusing on three Latin American countries, prepare a brief report that identifies the common features of Latin American markets that management should consider when developing the cell phones the firm will sell there. For example, what language should be used in the cell phones? What pricing should management use? You may wish to consult the country commercial guides, Country Insights, and market research reports available through globalEDGE™. In addition, the U.S. Department of Commerce (www.export.gov) is a useful resource.

Design a process by which to mix the M&M's of varying colors evenly, and fill into individual sized bags.

Criteria: Effective , Effecient, Reproducable, Reliable, Temperature sensitive, Fragile

Your company has developed a new scanning machine which can facilitate clearing of goods at the Ports and you have been tasked by the Managing Director to sell the new product idea to the Tema Ports. As a Marketing manager:

a. Discuss the selling process you will recommend your Sales officer follows in order to achieve success?

. b. Why is personal selling important in industrial situation?.

Choose one factor which influences on the effectiveness of a manager and explain it, and determine what can you do with this factor?

1. Describe the organizational structure of Boeing. Do you think it is optimally organized to achieve its goals? Why or why not?

2. What factors predict which type of organizational structure a company is most likely to adopt?

3. Find an example of a firm that operates as an LLC. Why do you think the owners of this firm chose this form of business over others?

Value Proposition-Entrepreneurship class

Type of Business: Tea Lounge

Identify Benefits of Your Business Idea in the Value Proposition. The value proposition addresses one question: why is your solution best?

A value proposition is defined as small business owners’ unique selling points (or benefits) that customers can expect from your goods or services including benefits that differentiate your offering from those of competition. The value proposition helps the entrepreneur focus on the most important aspects of your business.

The value proposition should include the following information:

• For (target customer)
• Who (statement of need or opportunity)
• The (retail business name) is a (product or service category)
• That (statement of key benefit)
• Unlike (primary competitive alternative)
• Our business (statement of primary differentiation)
• Is available (where)

Here is an example of the outline (please add as much details as you can):

Health Food Store Value Proposition serves residents of Union, NJ with a household income of $x and up who need advice regarding natural alternatives to health-related issues…

HFS is a health food store which provides the local community with vitamins and herbs …

Unlike our competition (an actual business name here), our business has a knowledgeable business owner on staff who is a nurse w/ 25+ yrs. experience running her own health food store.

Health Food Store will be located on Morris Ave in Union, NJ…

You will expand upon your value proposition when you write your business plan.

Where in the World Is Timbuk2?

Outsourcing, Offshoring, and Mass Customization1Brennan Mulligan paused to admire the San Francisco skyline before entering the leased building that housed all of Timbuk2’s activities, from management to manufacturing (Figure 1). Who would imagine that anyone could profitably manufacture a textile product in San Francisco in 2002? With competition not only from lower-cost centers in the United States but also from China and other places in the Far East, a converted warehouse building in San Francisco was an unlikely location for this manufacturing business. Yet Brenna n was not sure Timbuk2 could continue indefinitely to produce everything in San Francisco. While the pride and satisfaction of producing in San Francisco were ingrained in Timbuk2’s culture, and moving production elsewhere would be a huge change for a small company with local roots, Timbuk2 needed to remain profitable. Hence, Brennan knew there was no easy answer to the question on the table: Should Timbuk2 outsource some (or all) of its production to a Chinese firm?

History and processesTimbuk2 were founded in 1989 by Rob Honeycutt, aSan Francisco bicycle messenger with an old sewing machine. The Timbuk2 Web site (www.timbuk2.com) describes Rob’s goal, “to make a messenger bag rugged enough for real bicycle messengers, yet stylish enough to appeal to a broader market of young, hip urbanites as an alternative to the traditional two-strap daypack. Our catchy name, three-panel design, distinctive ‘swirl’ logo, and the fact that we’re ‘Madein San Francisco’ added to our cachet.”

2At one time Timbuk2’s Web site claimed that its bags were “messenger-designed, civilian-approved, and guaranteed to wear like hell.”Early on, Rob became interested in lean manufacturing and mass customization and hired Brennan Mulligan, then a young graduate from the University of California at Berkeley, to take up the cause. Brennan joined the firm in 1993to help Rob implement his vision. Rob and Brennan managed the company for its first seven years. By 2002 the management team included four other guys, who, together with Rob and Brennan, ran the show at Timbuk2. Collegiality and informality characterized the work environment, where shaving and closed-toe shoes were generally optional for the management team. The name of one of their early successful products, “El Ocho,” was born one-night in Mexico when the VP of marketing woke up to find himself in jail “Number Eight.” (The circumstances shall remain undisclosed.)By 1996, Timbuk2 was a smooth-running operation selling a variety of bicycle messenger bags and similar products whose manufacturing process was first characterized by lean manufacturing and then, once leanness was achieved, by mass customization. Brennan reflected on the many changes they had implemented on their path through lean manufacturing and on to mass customization, and the many decisions the team members had to consider. If the company had not pursued lean manufacturing, Brennan believed that it would not have been able to deliver a product customized to a mass market. Lean manufacturing’s emphasis on eliminating waste and improving quality through smaller batch sizes and streamlined product and information flows had been particularly critical. Brennan recalled that the efforts to reduce batch sizes were much more difficult than they had made it sound in business school. After much analysis and experimentation, the team purchased many additional sewing machines, greatly reduced setups at nearly every step of the manufacturing process, and altered the layout and organization of the factory floor in order to handle batch sizes as small as one item. In addition, they altered the process so that the information associated with a specific order, such as colors and add-on options, was available to workers as they worked on individual bags. A customer order was printed for each bag to accompany it through the manufacturing process. Through experimentation, Timbuk2 found that it was most effective to have work cells of five employees manufacture bags from start to finish as they filled individual customer orders. As each cell operated, there would be five bags in the process, one for each worker. Each employee was trained to perform all of the tasks to produce a bag, and a “bump-back” process was used to balance the workload. When the worker assigned to the last position finished her bag (sending it off to the shipping area), she would “bump back” to the next-to-last position and take over production of that bag, wherever it was in the process. The person in that position would then “bump back” to the previous person, and so on until the person at the beginning of the process would go to the order backlog and begin producing the bag associated with the next order in the queue. Brennan was amazed at the dexterity, speed, and accuracy of the cutters and sewers, all of whom were women, mostly of Asian descent. Figures 3-6 in the Appendix show some of the processes and inventory locations at Timbuk2.After Timbuk2 had successfully implemented a relatively lean manufacturing process with batch sizes as small as one, it was in a position to mass-customize bags. Many new issues had to be worked through to implement mass customization, however, including decisions about product offerings, pricing, delivery, and order processing.The decisions about product offering were especially critical. How many choices should the company provide customers? While every bag had three panels that could be customized according to the customer’s choice of colors, how many colors should be allowed? Each additional color meant more fabric to stock. What other options should the company offer? For example,if Timbuk2 offered a bag with a handle, the management team would need to configure the machines and processes and then train the sewers how to make a bag with this option. If they allowed customers the choice of panel size (in addition to color) the issues would be even more complex, in that equipment able to customized pieces of fabric with little setup time was very expensive, among other issues.Timbuk2’s process for determining which choices to offer customers was based on management intuition. Options were added if they seemed relatively straightforward to offer (in the sense that they would be easy to manufacture with processes currently in place and perceived to be attractive to the customer. For example, they would typically offer between 12 and 16 color choices for the material—enough to cover most of the color palette, but still manageable for stocking and managing inventory.A nice feature of mass customization was that the company could temporarily delete a color from the product offering if it was out of stock.By 1997, Timbuk2 was able to produce bags in batches of one with its signature three-panel, tri-color messenger bag design. Bags could be made in multiple sizes, fabrics, and colors, andTimbuk2 was also capable of adding other options to individual bags such as center dividers, reflector tabs, and tails, grab straps (handles), and even a variety of logo colors.In 2000, Timbuk2 launched it's “Build Your Own Bag” page on its Web site (Figure 2), allowing customers to configure and order individual bags to their own specifications. Customers could see the bag they were configuring on the computer screen and experiment with different colors and options. The customer was offered different colors for the three panels at no extra cost, but most other options, such as the alternate logo color, came at a price. Spools of different colored thread were mounted on the machine that embroidered the logo on the bag. The worker would specify which color should go on the bag and the machine would use the thread from the appropriate spool. While producing a bag with the customer’s chosen logo colors cost no more than producing one with the standard logo color, Timbuk2 charged an additional $5 for a non-standard color. “Pure profit,” Brennan remarks, as he noted that many customers chose an

alternate color.By March 2002, Timbuk2 was shipping more than 200 bags per day through multiple channels.

Question

What criteria Timbuk2 should use for selecting which options to

offer in the e-commerce channel? Please discuss the impacts of each of the following options (i.e. a-c) on 1) the order

placement (i.e. the web design that enables consumers’ ordering of the option), 2)manufacturing processes, 3) facility layout, and 4) added value to customers:

a)an added handle;

b)different color logos; and

c)different size panels—means customers can specify panel sizes, which may be non-standard. You need to discuss how each of a), b) and c) affects items 1)—4).