1. You’ve implemented the Academic Database in a local school in your community. The school’s administrator decides, there’s no need for database backup and recovery plan because all their computers are new. Explain in 100 to 150 words why there needs to be a disaster recovery plan.

It is a common practice of Kodak in markets outside of the United States to sell slide film only bundled with development, i.e., when the customer buys Kodak film, she gets Kodak development for "free." In the U.S., however, slide film and slide film development are sold separately. Why might this be? Let us investigate the market in Malaysia.

Kodak's marketing research department has identified four broad categories of consumers in Malaysia interested in slide photography: the Malays (type A), the Chinese (type B), the Tamils (type C), and American tourists (type D). Because of the tropical climate and the limited photo opportunities, all photographers demand only one 36-slide roll per month. The four types differ in their relative preference for Kodak film and Kodak development. Because of deep-seated cultural traditions, the Malays (type A) tend to value the film much more than the development; the Chinese value the development much more than the film; the Tamils value both about equally and low; American tourists, however, value both high.

Given below are four alternative reservation price/marketing composition/cost scenarios. In each scenario, the relevant demand data are given as triples of numbers. The first number in each triple is the reservation price for a 36-slides roll of Kodak film, the second number is the reservation price for Kodak developing this roll of film, and the third number is the segment's size as a fraction of the picture-taking population. For example, in (1) below, A's willingness- to-pay for film is $3, its willingness-to-pay for development is $1, and this segment constitutes 10% of the population. Note we assume consumers can buy film and development separately.

(Please highlight the optimal pricing strategy.)

(i) A ($3, $1, 0.10) B ($1, $3, 0.10) C ($1, $1, 0.70) D ($3, $3, 0.10) Unit cost of film: $0.50; Unit cost of development: $0.50

(ii) A ($3, $1, 0.25) B ($1, $3, 0.25) C ($1, $1, 0.25) D ($3, $3, 0.25) Unit cost of film: $0.50; Unit cost of development: $0.50

(iii) A ($3, $1, 0.25) B ($1, $3, 0.25) C ($1, $1, 0.25) D ($2.5, $2.5, 0.25) Unit cost of film: $0.50; Unit cost of development: $0.50

(iv) A ($3, $1, 0.25) B ($1, $3, 0.25) C ($1, $1, 0.25) D ($2.5, $2.5, 0.25) Unit cost of film: $1.50; Unit cost of development: $1.50

(1) Determine the profit-maximizing selling strategy in each scenario above.

(2) From this analysis, what can we say about why Kodak has different marketing policies in the U.S. and Malaysia?

Internal Audit

The PIXEL Company performs its expenditure cycle activities using its integrated ERP system as follows:

 Employees in any department can enter purchase requests for items they note as being either out of stock or in small quantity.

 The company maintains a perpetual inventory system.

 Each day, employees in the purchasing department process all purchase requests from the prior day. To the extent possible, requests for items available from the same supplier are combined into one larger purchase order in order to obtain volume discounts. Purchasing agents use the Internet to compare prices in order to select suppliers. If an Internet search discovers a potential new supplier, the purchasing agent enters the relevant information in the system, thereby adding the supplier to the approved supplier list. Purchase orders above $10,000 must be approved by the purchasing department manager. EDI is used to transmit purchase orders to most suppliers, but paper purchase orders are printed and mailed to suppliers who are not EDI capable.

 Receiving department employees have read-only access to outstanding purchase orders. Usually, they check the system to verify existence of a purchase order prior to accepting delivery, but sometimes during rush periods they unload trucks and place the items in a corner of the warehouse where they sit until there is time to use the system to retrieve the relevant purchase order. In such cases, if no purchase order is found, the receiving employee contacts the supplier to arrange for the goods to be returned.

 Receiving department employees compare the quantity delivered to the quantity indicated on the purchase order. Whenever a discrepancy is greater than 5%, the receiving employee sends an email to the purchasing department manager. The receiving employee uses an online terminal to enter the quantity received before moving the material to the inventory stores department.

 Inventory is stored in a locked room. During normal business hours an inventory employee allows any employee wearing an identification badge to enter the storeroom and remove needed items. The inventory storeroom employee counts the quantity removed and enters that information in an online terminal located in the storeroom.

 Occasionally, special items are ordered that are not regularly kept as part of inventory, from a specialty supplier who will not be used for any regular purchases. In these cases, an accounts payable clerk creates a one-time supplier record.  All supplier invoices (both regular and one-time) are routed to accounts payable for review and approval. The system is configured to perform an automatic 3- way match of the supplier invoice with the corresponding purchase order and receiving report.  Each Friday, approved supplier invoices that are due within the next week are routed to the treasurer’s department for payment. The cashier and treasurer are the only employees authorized to disburse funds, either by EFT or by printing a check. Checks are printed on dedicated printer located in the treasurer’s department, using special stock paper that is stored in a locked cabinet accessible only to the treasurer and cashier. The paper checks are sent to accounts payable to be mailed to suppliers.

 Monthly, the treasurer reconciles the bank statements and investigates any discrepancies with recorded cash balances.

Required: a. Identify at least five activities (or sub-processes) within the expenditure process described above. (3 points)

b. Identify five risks associated with the five activities identified on a. (5 points)

c. Propose a control for each risk identified on b. (5 points)

Note:

Present your answer in a risk/ control matrix reduced to only three-column table with these headings: Activity (or Sub-processes), Risks, and Controls.

  19. The pH of a solution prepared by mixing 50.0 mL of 0.125 M NaOH and 40.0 mL of

0.125 M HNO₃ is ____

   [A] 13.29 [B] 8.11 [C] 11.00 [D] 12.14 [E] 7.00

20. The pH of a solution prepared by mixing 50.0 mL of 0.125 M KOH and 50.0 mL of 0.125 M HCl is ______

[A] 1.34 [B] 5.78 [C]1.90 [D] 1.14 [E] 7.0

21. Consider the following table for K_sp values

Which will have the least solubility in the given solvent?

[A] CdCO₃ [B] Cd(OH)₂ [C] CdF₂ [D] AgI [E] ZnCO₃

  22. What is the molar solubility of magnesium oxalate ( MgC₂O₄) in water? The solubility-

   product constant for MgC₂O₄ is 8.6 x 10^-5 at 25 °C.

[A] 4.07 [B] 1.7 x10^-4 [C] 1.3 x10^-2 [D] 4.3 x10^-5 [E] 9.3 x10^-3

The enthalpy change for the following reaction is -748 kJ. Using bond energies, estimate the C≡O bond energy in CO(g). 2CO(g) + 2NO(g)2CO2(g) + N2(g)

Amelia Inc. is considering the purchase of a new piece of equipment. The cost savings from the equipment would result in an annual increase in net income of $200,900. The equipment will have an initial cost of $1,200,900 and have an 8 year life. The salvage value of the equipment is estimated to be $200,900. The hurdle rate is 10%. Ignore income taxes. (Future Value of $1, Present Value of $1, Future Value Annuity of $1, Present Value Annuity of $1.) (Use appropriate factor from the PV tables.)

What is the accounting rate of return? (Round your answer to 2 decimal places.)



b. What is the payback period? (Round your answer to one decimal place.)



c. What is the net present value? (Do not round intermediate calculations and round your final answer to the nearest dollar amount.)



d. What would the net present value be with a 13% hurdle rate? (Do not round intermediate calculations and round your final answer to the nearest dollar amount.)



e. Based on the NPV calculations, in what range would the equipment’s internal rate of return fall? (Round your answer to 2 decimal places.)

Scenario:

            Startup company established on 01/01/20XX has 12 people personnel of which one executive director, one CIO one manager of software one manager of hardware one CFO and 5 engineers and one secretary, which plays role of public relations as well apart from day to day data management duties.

            The company develops hardware and software for resolvers which sells on larger companies. Some of the contracts include the company to be supplier of a larger company which has government contracts.

            The company exploits one central server with 100 nodes, shared storage, shared data space similar to DropBox, shared scanner and 10 printers.

            All workstations were placed in cubicles in main room and the secretary desk and workstation along with 2 printers was set up at main entrance hallway.

Q1. On March 10/20XX the new server was delivered and mangers along with CIO and executive director made a meeting to establish a policy of use of the resource. It was decided that:

• All engineers’ personnel and CIO will have access to all files 365/24 remotely and from their office workstations.
• The CFO will have access only to data dealing with matherials for current month.
• The Executive director will have access only to CIO reports and CFO reports but not data on projects.
• Secretary will have all access to all documents and data all the time.

Do you think this set up have security risks? Describe these risks if any and propose a better solution and describe why your solution is better.   

C++ give some examples of where you could use the stream manipulators to format output.

At a recent halloween party, the women appeared to be consuming more packages of halloween candy than were the men. If the mean number of packages consumed by the 3 men was 4, and that for the 7 women was 6, and the standard deviation for the whole group was 2 packages, what was the correlation between gender and the number of packages consumed?

I am having difficulties understanding how to solve this homework problem.

Case Study:

James McBride, general manager of the new Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C., faced the largest
challenge of his successful career. A proven veteran of the luxury hotel chain’s march across Asia, cBride’s most recent assignment was as the general manager of the 248-room Ritz-Carlton in Kuala Lumpur. For the first time, The Ritz-Carlton was opening a hotel that was part of a multi-use facility. Owned by Millennium Partners and located in the historic Foggy Bottom district of Washington, D.C., the $225 million “hospitality complex” covered two-anda-
half acres and included 162 luxury condominiums, a 100,000 square-foot Sports Club/LA, a Splash Spa, three restaurants, 40,000 square feet of street-level restaurants and retail shops featuring the latest designs from Italy and other countries, as well as the 300-room hotel. While The Ritz-Carlton had already signed contracts to manage five other hotels for Millennium Partners, the upscale property developers had also inked deals with the Ritz’s foremost competitor—the Four Seasons.
Brian Collins, manager of hotels for Millennium Partners, had his own ideas about what constituted luxury service and how the hotel’s general manager should approach the new-hotel opening. Under pressure from Collins, McBride was reexamining the “Seven Day Countdown,” a hallmark of The Ritz-Carlton’s well-defined hotel-opening process. Any changes McBride made could not only affect his company’s future relationship with Millennium Partners but also the carefully guarded Ritz- Carlton brand.

Filling hotel rooms was crucial, and The Ritz-Carlton’s general managers aggressively pursued their
two main customer groups: (1) independent travelers, and (2) meeting event planners.

Because they attracted many individual guests at once, meeting event planners were seen as “the
vital few” customers, representing a small number of organizations that held many large meetings in various locations around the world. These “vital few” accounted for 40% of annual sales income.
"Our event business pays the mortgage. The individual traveler helps us with our
profitability. The nature of our business is that a guest room and space is the most perishable
product we have. An apple left unsold today can be sold tomorrow, but a room night lost
today is lost forever."

One of the components of the SQIs involved guest-recognition procedures. As an owner, Collins
wanted to see that improved for the new Washington, D.C. hotel:
I pushed James [McBride] to hire more people than The Ritz-Carlton staffing plan would
lead them to hire in Guest Recognition. I think it’s the single most important thing we can do.
If a guest came in, got what they wanted, and were recognized, all of a sudden that creates a
sticky relationship. It’s all about organizing your thoughts and creating processes to recognize
the person coming in to the hotel.
So after a certain number of visits to one of our Ritz hotels, guests will get a monogrammed
pillowcase. It will be in their room so that when they check in, they’ll go to their room and say,
“Oh, my pillow’s here. Isn’t that great!” And no one expects it, so the first time, it’s like
“Wow!” We’re doing something different from The Ritz-Carlton standard—we’re clearly
exceeding the standard. But they don’t force every owner to abide by that higher standard, so sometimes there is friction about raising the standard outside of the Ritz program. I want to rethink it, rethink it all from start to finish. And it just drives them crazy.

Human Resources at The Ritz-Carlton
The way The Ritz-Carlton viewed its employees was a distinguishing hallmark of the
organization. According to Leonardo Inghilleri, the corporate vice president of human resources:
We respect our employees. The issue of respect is a philosophical issue that is driven by
our leadership. You have to have a passion for people. If you have an accounting approach to
human resources, then you’re bound to fail. If you look at an employee and say, “He’s a fulltime
equivalent, he’s an FTE; he is eight hours of labor,” I think that’s immoral. An employee
is a human being who doesn’t only fulfill a function but should also have a purpose. So a
successful business is one that is capable of enlisting an employee not only for his muscles and
his labor, but also for his brain, his heart, and his soul.
In hotels that were up and running for at least a year, The Ritz-Carlton’s annual turnover rate was
only 20%, compared with the hotel industry average of 100%, while new hotels experienced turnover rates between 20% and 25% during the first 60 days. Inghilleri believed that it was his company’s deep respect for its employees that led to their satisfaction with and commitment to the organization.
The Ritz-Carlton was so intent on treating their employees well that a “Day 21” event was held as a process check three weeks after any new hire’s start date. During that session, the company assessed the degree to which it had lived up to the promises it made to its employees during orientation and initial training.
One of those promises included opportunities for career advancement, which were abundant at
The Ritz-Carlton. Corporatewide, 25% of the organization’s managerial workforce began their
careers at The Ritz-Carlton as hourly employees, such as dishwasher, housekeeper, and restaurant server, or as hourly supervisors.

Through the extensive formal and informal training offered by The Ritz-Carlton,
employees were prepared to fulfill their current obligations and to accept positions of greater
responsibility and accountability in the future. Employees with advancement ambitions were
encouraged to cross-train and learn about as many different aspects of the organization as possible.
Our employees are taught from the very beginning that there is nothing more exciting than fixing a mistake or defect. They want to see the defects, they want to find out what they are, because once that’s known, they can be corrected. We’ve never had a problem with people hiding mistakes, because it’s just not the culture of the company.

Staffing the New Hotel
The property owners had the right to approve the individuals nominated by The Ritz-Carlton for
three executive positions: general manager, director of marketing, and controller. Once McBride was selected as the general manager, he was instrumental in choosing the additional members of the hotel’s executive committee, almost all of whom had experience at other Ritz-Carlton properties. These leaders were in place about two and a half months prior to the scheduled hotel opening. The executive committee then selected their functional managers, who were, in turn, primarily responsible for hiring line-staff members. For positions that required technical expertise or high-level service delivery, individuals with significant prior experience were hired. For more entry–level positions, novices to the hospitality industry were acceptable.

The Seven Day Countdown was a result of the evolution and refinement of the hotel-opening
process, which became more solidified in the late 1980s to early 1990s when the hotel chain was
opening many new properties. The first two days were devoted entirely to orienting employees to The Ritz-Carlton culture and values, while the remaining five days involved more specific skills training and trial runs of service delivery. According to Collins, ensuring that everything was perfect on opening day would be a challenge:
There’s all this construction activity going on around here, finishing floors, testing the firealarm
system. And they have 400 people they have to convert to Ritz-Carlton employees in the
next seven days. They have to be trained and dipped into the culture of The Ritz-Carlton so
that on day one when Ms. Jones checks in, she’s getting a true Ritz experience. Seven days.
I’ve told James I just don’t know if that’s enough time.

Day One: Staff Orientation
On the first day of the countdown, new employees joined other members of their divisions
outside the hotel for what can only be described as a pep rally. As they slowly wound their way downstairs toward the ballrooms where their first training sessions would occur, the employees heard the sound of enthusiastic applause. It was coming from the hotel’s managers, who lined both sides of the curved marble staircase. Many times over, each employee was sincerely welcomed as a new member of The Ritz-Carlton family.

Once everyone was present, McBride introduced the hotel’s leadership team, followed by The Ritz-Carlton trainers, who had come from 23 different countries around the world for the countdown. Addressing all the employees of the new hotel, Schulze explained his philosophy of being a high-quality service organization:
You are not servants. We are not servants. Our profession is service. We are Ladies and
Gentlemen, just as the guests are, who we respect as Ladies and Gentlemen. We are Ladies
and Gentlemen and should be respected as such.

Day Two: Departmental Vision Sessions
On the second day of the Seven Day Countdown, employees in each functional area met for an
introduction to their new departments. Group exercises were used to help the employees learn more about one another, their likes and dislikes, and how they could function together as an effective unit.
For the next five days, the hotel’s leadership team, trainers, and managers met each morning at
6:00 a.m. to review the day’s training activities and to resolve any difficulties that had arisen.

The last three days of the Seven Day Countdown was when departmental technical training
occurred. Employees learned the details involved in performing their jobs to the standards set by
The Ritz-Carlton, and everyone was expected to master their department’s key production processes. Employees arrived in two shifts, dressed in their full uniforms, and every employee practiced his or her job as if they were serving real customers.

Recognizing that their standards of service were extremely high and that their goal of opening as
a top-notch hotel right from the start was a tall order, The Ritz-Carlton tried to protect their
employees from feeling overwhelmed by controlling the occupancy rate. Inghilleri explained:
The first month of operations, we may open the hotel with 50% occupancy. Then we’ll
increase occupancy monthly, so it takes us somewhere between three and four months to reach
80%. But we hire, in the very beginning, as if we’re already operating at 80% occupancy.
This allows us to reduce the number of tables a waiter has to serve, or the number of rooms
a housekeeper has to clean. It is more important that we set the standards immediately. They
have to do their jobs perfectly, even if it takes them longer; productivity will increase as they
get more and more comfortable. Flawless execution is the goal, and then speed will come.
On the day between the end of the Seven Day Countdown and the grand opening, employees showed up in casual attire for The Ritz-Carlton two-hour pep rally, marking the transition between practice runs and real service delivery. The next day, on October 11, 2000, the Washington, D.C., Ritz-Carlton Hotel opened for business.

Dilemma
McBride sat in his new office in Washington, reflecting on the concerns that Collins had
expressed, with his usual blunt style and candor, about the Seven Day Countdown. Collins
questioned whether the seven-day time frame limited the hotel’s ability to open at a higher
occupancy rate and to reach 80% occupancy in a shorter amount of time.
It was difficult to train new hires to meet the high expectations of The Ritz-Carlton service
standards in only seven days, but that was how The Ritz-Carlton worked. Maybe the training should be longer, but what would that mean for The Ritz-Carlton? McBride would be responsible for opening the second Millennium Partners-owned Ritz-Carlton hotel, in Georgetown, at the end of 2001. Should he try changing the Seven Day Countdown process, which was a worldwide best practice for the company?

Questions:

In what may be a first for the hospitability industry, Brian Collins, hotel owner, has asked James McBride, Ritz-Carlton general manager, to lengthen the amount of time spent training hotel employees before hotel opening. For this assignment, you are taking the role of James McBride.

1) What is the context of the decision? What is dilemma faced by the Ritz-Carlton?

2) Analysis of the situation:

• Monetary factors: what would be the monetary consequences of opening directly at 80% occupancy as requested by rather than ramping up from 50% to 80% over a four-month period of time?
• Non-monetary factors: what are the key non-monetary factors/considerations that are going to drive your decision?

1. A Contracting Officer should consider various source documents such as: SOO/SOW/PWS, synopsis, RFP, exchanges with industry, market surveys, RFIs, etc., to determine if a change is in-scope.

True or False

2. This is a change to a solicitation done in the pre-award phase of acquisition:

a. Amendment

b. Modification

c. Supplemental Agreement

d. Equitable Adjustment

3. This is change to a contract done in the post-award phase of acquisition:

a. Modification

b. Amendment

c. Protest

d. Claim

4. If a Constructive Change occurs, the Government may:

a. All of these conditions are corrrect

b. Confirm and fund the change

c. Countermand the change

d. Notify the Contractor that no change is considered to have occurred

Tybee Industries Inc. uses a job order cost system

A type of cost accounting system that provides for a separate record of the cost of each particular quantity of product that passes through the factory.

. The following data summarize the operations related to production for January, the first month of operations:

Demonstrate, with a program, if this is true or false

:Scope is the portion of a program that can refer to an entity by its simple name