In: Accounting
For each of the following brief scenarios, indicate whether the
HIGHEST ranking supervisor (in the scenario) acted
in an appropriate manner and give reasons as to
why or why not.
1. The purchasing manager for a firm had been bragging in the factory break room about the great deal that he got for the firm on some paper for the printing department of the organization. In the meantime, the manager of the printing department was discovering that the quality of the paper was inconsistent, and it was causing three times the normal amount of malfunctions of the printing equipment, resulting in extra labor usage and more than the usual waste of paper. The Vice-President of Production of this firm reviews the performance of each manager and support staff person at a group meeting of these people once every quarter. The Vice-President of Production, at the most recent meeting, praised the purchasing manager and criticized the manager of the printing department for their respective performances in keeping variances under control.
2. The Vice-President of Manufacturing at a major corporation recently issued a mandate that one unit per day from each assembly line in the organization must be pulled from the assembly line and subjected to destructive sampling to ensure the quality of all products being produced. The Paper Clip division produces 5,000 boxes of paper clips per day and gladly complied with the mandate. The Filing Cabinet division of the firm produces 15 filing cabinets per day. At this month's end-of-month review of division performance, the Vice-President criticized the Filing Cabinet division for the sudden 7% increase in materials and labor costs experienced and the sudden 6.5% drop in number of goods units of output from the amounts that the budget expected.
Ans-1
The peformance of Printing is also related to the quality of input used.In this given scenarion the inferior quality of paper was the prime reason for the dip in performance of Printing Manager.Procurement is responsibility of of Purchase department , this way there is a clear dependency between Printing and Purchasing.Since the Purchase manager bought inferior quality paper at low price the ramifications ahd to be borne by the Printing department.
The Vice President before arriving at the conclusion should have done a root cause.This check would have clearly established that it was not Print Manager at fault but the Purchase manager who acted irresponsibly.
Hence Vive President did not act correctly here.
Ans-2
The problem here is lack of vision on part of Vice President to differentiate between - Low cost high volume and High cost low volume items.
Clips clearly are of former category and filing cabinets of latter.It is but obvious a day's pull down will be more visible in numbers for filing cabinet then that for clips.
He did not act deligently.