BSOP 434 WEEK 4 LAB EASING IRA’S IRE
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BSOP 434 WEEK 4 LAB EASING IRA’S IRE
Lab 4: Easing Ira’s Ire
(See “Due Dates for Assignments & Exams” in the Syllabus for
due dates.)
Submit your assignment to the Dropbox located on the silver tab
at the top of this page.
Scenario/Summary
Ira Pollack was difficult to work for. A self-made millionaire,
he paid extremely high salaries, but demanded much from his subordinates,
including being on call 24-hours per day. In his Las Vegas penthouse, he would
study and re-study each detail of his conglomerate’s performance and then call
some unlucky underling—at any hour—to vent his anger and demand that something
be improved. His tantrums were legendary.
One of Pollack’s underlings, Tamara Wood, was driving her new
red Mercedes convertible along Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, looking for a
parking space. Her college class from Northern Illinois University at DeKalb
was holding its fifth reunion in Chicago, which she planned to attend. She
wanted to buy a new outfit for the event, to show her former classmates that
she had arrived. A chauffeur-driven Rolls pulled away from the curb, leaving an
empty space right in front of her favorite couturier. She swung her Mercedes expertly
into the empty space, looked up, and was pleased to see that there was still
nearly an hour left on the meter. “Daddy was right,” she thought to herself,
“Clean living does pay off.”
As she turned off the ignition, Tamara’s cell phone started
buzzing. Wood hesitated. Would it be John, calling to thank her for that
wonderful evening? Would it be Matt, seeing if she were free to spend next
weekend on Catalina Island? Or maybe it was Jason, who was always wanting her
to accompany him to Waikiki. She finally picked up the phone and sweetly said,
“Hello.”
“Don’t ‘hello’ me!” shouted a man’s voice at the other end.
Wood’s stomach churned, her muscles tightened, and she said,
weakly, “Sorry, Mr. Pollack, I was expecting somebody else.”
“That’s obvious,” he retorted. “At this hour of the day, you’re
on my time and should be thinking of business. How come you’re not in the
office?”
“I’m just making a customer service follow-up,” responded Wood,
hoping that Mr. Pollack would not ask for too many details.
“Well, you should be worried about customer service,” said
Pollack. “That’s why I’ve called. I’ve been studying performance records for
all my operations dealing with the amount of time that elapses between our
receipt of an order and when our customer receives a shipment. The performance
of your distribution center in West Hollywood stinks! Drop what you’re doing
and get back to your office and figure out what’s wrong! Then tell me what’s
needed to speed up your operation. Call me as soon as you have answers.”
Wood heard the phone click. She forgot about DeKalb. She forgot
about Chicago and the new outfit. She forgot about her night with John, about
Catalina Island and Waikiki. She heard a faint beep to her left. She saw a
maroon Jaguar with a Beverly Hills matron motioning with one of her
white-gloved hands as if to say, “If you’re leaving, may I have your parking
spot?”
Muttering to herself, she pulled into her reserved slot next to
the West Hollywood distribution center. “Aloha!” chirped Ellen Scott, her
assistant, as she walked in. “Jason has called three times about wanting you to
fly to Hawaii. Also, you have two calls from John, one from Matt, one from your
mother, who asked why you never phone her, and one from some fellow who
wouldn’t leave his name, but said it was very personal. Tell me about the
outfit you bought. I’ll bet it’s stunning.”
“Forget about them, and hold all my calls,” said Wood, crisply.
“I’m not going anywhere. Pollack called me and is mad because our order
processing and delivery times are out of whack.”
Two days passed. Wood had put her social life on hold and had
not even phoned her mother. All her time was spent trying to figure out how to
speed up her order-processing system. But she didn’t know how to start. The
accuracy of the system was not an issue, although additional costs could be.
When Pollack paid his bonuses last year, he had told Wood that if her operation
had cost one cent more to run, she would not have receive a bonus. Because her
bonus had paid for her new Mercedes, Wood was cost-conscious, to say the least.
Wood’s assistant helped her, too—at least through late Friday
afternoon. Scott explained that she couldn’t work on Saturday and Sunday
because she’d accepted an invitation to spend the weekend at Catalina Island
with an unnamed friend. Before Scott left, she and Wood had decided that there
were 12 distinct operations involved in processing and shipping orders. Some
could be performed at the same time, whereas others had to be performed in
sequence—that is, one could not be started until the other was completed.
(These tasks, the amount of time it takes to complete each, and the sequential
relationships, if any, are shown in Exhibit 11-A.)
After compiling the information shown in Exhibit 11-A, Scott
left. Wood was left with the task of trying to relate all those tasks to each
other. She recalled a college textbook that she had never much cared for but
that she had come across a few weeks earlier as she was searching for her
Northern Illinois University yearbook. Wood looked at a PERT chart in that book
and knew that she would have to construct something similar to analyze the
distribution center’s order processing and shipping operations. She studied the
text accompanying the chart, sighed, and thought to herself, “Where was I or at
least where was my mind—the day the professor explained all of this in class?
Deliverables
This week’s lab consists of five questions. Please be certain
you answer all the questions and address all the areas outlined in the grading
below.
L A B S T E P S
Step 1: PERT Chart
Step 1: PERT Chart
Question 1: Arrange the tasks shown in Exhibit 11-A in a network
or PERT chart.
Step 2: Critical Path
Step 3: Risk
Question 3: Considering your answers to questions 1 and 2, what
areas of activity do you think Wood should look at first, assuming she wants to
reduce order-processing and delivery times? Why?
Step 4: Order Picker
Question 4: Now that she’s a Californian ready for the race down
the information superhighway, Wood wants to be able to impress Pollack with her
knowledge of current technology. Recently, a sales representative from a
warehouse equipment company called, trying to interest her in installing a Star
Wars—Robotic” order picker for the warehouse. Controlled by lasers and powered
by magnetic levitation, the device can pick orders (task H) in 15 minutes,
rather than 6 hours (0.75 day), the current time needed. How valuable would
such a device be to Wood? Why?
Step 5: Faster Transportation
Question 5: Another alternative is to use faster transportation.
How should Wood choose between paying more for faster transportation and paying
more for other improvements? Assume that her only goal is speed.
Step 6: Final Step
Submit your completed assignment to the this week’s Lab Dropbox
in a MS Word document for grading. The cover page should adhere to the APA 6.0
guideline.
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