A Wall Street Journal (April 8,2014) article noted that a study by the U.S. Congressional Budget Office "estimated raising the minimum wages to $10.10 an hour would reduce U.S. employment by 500,000 but lift 900,000 Americans out of poverty." Why might raising the minimum wage reduce employment? How would it raise some people out of poverty? What effect might these estimates have on a normative analysis of the minimum wage?
In: Operations Management
In: Accounting
A researcher was interested in utilities provided by city governments. The researcher randomly selected 20 counties from a list of all counties in the U.S. From each of these counties the researcher then contacted each city government (a total of 192) and found that 12 (6.25%) of them provided electricity to their residents. In this situation the sampling frame is
Select one:
a. the list of all counties in the U.S.
b. the 316 cities.
c. the 20 counties.
d. 6.25%.
In: Math
An article in the U.S. News & Works Report (September 28, 1981) states that approximately 21.3 million workers, more than a fifth of the workforce in the United States, have unorthodox working hours. More than 9.3 million work on a flexible schedule (the worker plans his own schedule) or on a weekly "compressed" schedule. A company planning to install flexible hours estimated that an average of 7 hours a day per assembly worker was needed to operate efficiently. Each of the company's 80 assemblers was asked to submit a tentative flexible schedule. If the average number of hours per day for Monday was 6.7 hours, and the standard deviation 2.7 hours. Using a 95% confidence interval, do the data provide evidence that the average number of hours worked every Monday, for all fitters in the company, will be less than 7 hours?
Por medio de una prueba de hipótesis, contestar usando un nivel de significancia del 5%
In: Statistics and Probability
Casper Ice Cream
The Casper Ice Cream Company is an ice cream manufacturer in Richmond, Utah famous for making Fat Boy Ice Cream Sandwiches. The owner, Mr. Casper, the grandson of the founder, is considering replacing an existing ice cream maker and batch freezer with a new maker which has a greater output capacity and operates with less labor. His only alternative is to overhaul his ice cream maker and batch freezer which have a current net book value of $6,000 and three years of remaining depreciable life (straight line). The equipment would cost $10,000 to overhaul but this would increase its useful life for 10 years which is also the life of the new machinery. Mr. Casper’s accountant tells him the new net book value of the overhauled equipment could be depreciated straight line over four years. The old machinery has zero salvage value currently.
The new maker and freezer would cost $50,000 including installation. It would be fully depreciated over 10 years and would have $3,000 salvage at the end of that period. Because of automatic features, the new equipment would allow labor saving of $9,000 per year.
Even though the new equipment has increase capacity, Mr. Casper does not feel any extra product could be sold until year five. At that time, he estimates that additional sales would result in additional net cash revenues before tax of $5,000 per year for the remaining life of the machine. By the end of year four, however, working capital would have to be increased by $3,000 to support the higher sales. This increase in working capital will be recovered at the end of the project, which will last for 10 years.
Casper Company is currently in the 30% tax bracket. Mr. Casper demands a rate of return of 16%.
Complete a NPV and IRR analysis
In: Finance
Requirement: Below are one option of management problem brought to you by Executives of mid-size companies in Atlantic Canada. Design an approach to address this scenario include details on: Literature review methodology (if necessary), ethical considerations (if any), Problem statement (if necessary), Experimental Design (if necessary), Sampling Strategy(if necessary), Suggestions for analytical techniques (if necessary), Measurement method (if necessary), and any other information you deem is important to resolve the scenario using an evidence based management framework.
Leo the founder and president of Leisure Suit Lounge Wear is unsure of how successfully break into the generation Z market and has asked for your help. Leo runs a lounge wear company with the following customer demographics.
|
Customer age |
Percentage of total customers |
Average Spend per Customer |
|
<25 years |
5% |
$155 |
|
26-45 years |
20% |
$50 |
|
46 – 70 years |
25% |
$35 |
|
>71 years |
50% |
$45 |
He is concerned with aging nature of the customer base of his product and has noted that whilst generation Z (< 25 years old) is a small proportion of his customer base they have a large average spend per customer. He therefore believes that if Leisure Suit Lounge Wear can successfully advertise to younger customers, he could increase profitability and protect the company from a shrinking market share. However, he is unsure of how to advertise to generation Z. His niece has suggested partnering with TikTok influences whereas his sales manager has suggested either a traditional TV advertising campaign or a targeted campaign using internet advertising. In particular he would like to know if social media is a better prospect for advertising to generation Z than traditional advertising and if investing in partnering with influences is an effective method of increasing sales among a younger demographic.
He has asked for you help in applying evidence-based management to improving his sales in the targeted demographic.
In: Operations Management
You are a management consultant, and you have been engaged by A & J bank. The bank currently has over 150 branches in Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide. The CEO, Ali Jas, has asked you to develop a training plan which can be administered across all the bank branches, and also in its Melbourne Headquarters
1. a list, brief description, and justifications of training materials you will use to manage a team.
In: Economics
This article lists out six critical questions for the data analyst/user/presenter. Based on what you have learned about inventory management, please create a hypothetical scenario in which you answer those questions for the CEO of your firm.
My understanding of the business problem
How I will measure the business impact
What data is available
The initial solution hypothesis
The solution
The business impact of the solution
In: Operations Management
Do you or friends of your use the social networking site Facebook? Do you know businesses that use Facebook? How does an entrepreneur make all of our lives better? • The term IPO, or initial public offering, was also mentioned in the story. What would be a good reason to offer stock of Facebook to the public? What are the disadvantages to Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to offering shares of Facebook to the public?
In: Economics
In many workplaces ranging from Fortune 500 to small enterprises, workplace communication takes place over instant messaging. The leading platform in this space is Slack, a cloud-based team collaboration tool. Messages are organized by private and public channels and users can chat, share documents, browse through past messages, and collaborate with each other. Slack is solidifying the role of instant messages in the workplace and even if you end up in a company that does not use Slack, it is likely that you will end up using one of its competitors.
Slack has an interesting founding story: Stewart Butterfield, who is also a co-founder of the image hosting service Flickr, founded the video game company Tiny Speck and released the game Glitch in 2011. As part of their game development process, the company also built a team communication platform, allowing software developers to communicate with each other while building Glitch. Glitch was shut down after a year, but the company devoted itself to the full-scale development of their communication tool, which resulted in Slack. Through word of mouth, Slack acquired 16,000 users in its beta stage, and the product was fully released in 2014. Four years later, the company boasts 50,000 companies and 6 million users. The company expects to surpass e-mail use in the workplace by 2025.
Using instant messaging organized by private and public channels is changing how people communicate in the workplace, sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse. On the upside, Slack often receives feedback from users who identify as shy and introverted, stating that this tool allows them to participate more in team conversations. Anna Pickard, Creative Director of Voice and Tone, at Slack, also observes that messaging makes communication more humane and natural. Communication no longer takes place between small groups of people over e-mail. Instead, it occurs in channels that are searchable and are organized by team or topic. People can reach out to and connect with people they would not otherwise. Many companies have an "ask me anything" channel where employees may post messages and high-level managers may answer, resulting in greater transparency and accessibility to upper management, helping to create a sense of belonging.
At the same time, technology sometimes amplifies communication problems that also occur in person, and creates new ones of its own. If you have ever written a chat message and instantly regretted it, you can imagine the problems that may occur at scale in the workplace. The instantaneous nature of chat can make people less deliberate and careful about their messages. There are also examples of private feedback given in an open channel, resulting in a public shaming of an employee. Slack conversations, even if they are in private channels, can be read by the employer, and may result in adverse employment actions against the employee. There is no "forward" button on instant messages, but it is all too easy to take a screen shot of the conversation and share with others, resulting in Slack leaks, similar to e-mail leaks. Additionally, there is also user error—in e-mail it is relatively easy to find out who the recipients of the e-mail are, but on Slack, people may pay less attention to who is on that channel, and others may join the channel at a later point, suggesting that the audience for the posts will evolve and can grow over time. People may confuse which channel they are on, and post messages intended for a small group to a broad audience.
As Slack grows, it develops its own etiquette. For example, hitting "enter" after every sentence is often mentioned as a no-no, and a pet peeve of heavy users. Senders are expected to complete their message and then hit enter in one go. Other habits may result in productivity losses—spending time in private chats as opposed to working is one way in which Slack and tools like it may result in productivity losses. One company banned the use of Slack during meetings, as people were having back-channel conversations during the meeting, which was distracting and affecting engagement in the meeting. How these tools are used are shaped by the office culture, and in turn will have an impact on communication culture in the workplace.
If you were to create a social media policy including Slack, what types of rules would you include and why?
What types of messages do you believe are appropriate to communicate via Slack? For what type of communication is this tool less useful?
What type of communication barriers exist when workplace communication takes place over Slack and similar sources?
What are the implications of Slack and similar communication tools in affecting the sense of belonging that employees experience in the workplace?
Based on reading this case and your general experience with similar tools, what advice would you give to an employee who will start working in a company using Slack?
Can anyone help on this?.Thanks.
In: Operations Management