Assignment 1

Course: MBA 646 - Operations Management

Term: Spring 2015, cycle 2

Section: 07

class day: Tuesday-Wednesday

Professor: Dr. Marc Poulin

Instructions
You are to complete the questions below and submit them by Word document by email. The
assignment is worth 10%. You may work individually or in groupsup to six students. Support
your answers as much as possible by showing all calculations and assumptions. Please
provide a cover page that includes the name and student id of each member in your group.
The assignment is due on May 28.

You must abide by the ethical rules of CUD as mentioned in the student handbook.

Academic Integrity

Cheating refers to attempting or using unauthorized materials or obtaining

unauthorized assistance in an academic activity, including all types of examinations
or evaluations. This may include impersonating another student; looking at another
students materials; using unauthorized notes/books/calculators; talking to other
students; using communication devices such as mobile phones or any Bluetooth
devices.
Plagiarism includes, but is not limited to, representation of others work, lending
unauthorized assistance, and using strategies or processes with the aim of
attaining dishonest grades on tests or examinations. Students may not submit any
material created by or acquired from another person or business. Plagiarizing any
type of course work will not be tolerated. All instances of plagiarizing shall be

documented, presented to the Chair/Dean of the program and to the Registrar, and
recorded in the students file. Any violations to the Academic integrity will be
sanctioned. Please refer to the Catalog for further information on student Academic
Integrity.

The assignment can cover material from the PPTs of Weeks 1-4 (chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,
and 9).
1. A manager of a company wants to evaluate if the new software they bought last year has produced
the goal of 25% gain in productivity for the year. Employees went from servicing 400 customers to 600
customers with the new software. Monthly training costs went from 10,000 AED to 15,000 AED for all
employees. Employees were reduced from 20 to 18 in the year. The software cost 40,000 AED for the
year. Suppose each worker earns 8,000 AED/month. (2 marks)
a) Evaluate the productivity using quantitative analysis
b) Analyze the validity of your answer in a) by considering the various issues related to the productivity
measurement.

2.A company following a differentiation strategy needs to select between 3 suppliers. It has chosen four
comparative categories of interest: research capabilities, ease of cooperation, cost of services, and
quality of services. These categories have been assigned weights of 30%, 20%, 20%, and 30%,
respectively. The suppliers were scored on each of those factors (see table below) using a scale of 110, with a score of 1 meaning worst possible and 10 meaning best possible. (2 marks)

Research capability
Ease of cooperation
Cost of services
Quality of services

Supplier A Supplier B Supplier C

10
7
6
5
5
6
1
9
9
5
8
4

a)Evaluate which supplier should be selected.

b)Considering the strategy of the firm, would you change your selection in part a), why?

3. A quality analyst wants to construct a tool for measuring the average time of a process. She knows
from past experience that the process standard deviation is 6 minutes. Each day last week, she
randomly timed the process 6 times. The data from that activity appear below. (3 marks)

Time in minutes
Day

Timing 1

Timing 2

Timing 3

Timing 4

Timing 5

Timing 6

Monday

23

22

23

24

18

21

Tuesday

23

21

19

21

22

15

Wednesday

20

19

20

21

21

19

Thursday

18

19

20

19

23

19

Friday

18

20

22

20

16

22

a) By using 2-sigma for the control limits, propose a tool to monitor future average timings of the
process.
b) Discuss if the process is in control.
c) Criticize the tool by discussing its shortcomings.

4. A company sells one model of an office chair. Suppose demand is about 400 units per week and
there is slight variance in demand. There are 10 production hours available per day and 5 working days
per week. The tasks to produce the products are in the table below. (3 marks)
Time

Precedenc

Task

(min)

a)Critically compare how the company could produce the chairs using a process focus layout
versus a product focus layout.
b)If the company adopts a product focus layout, propose a balanced layout.
c) Propose what the company would need to do regarding process and layout strategy if it wants to
offer more product variety at controlled costs.