Kibby and Strand is holding its quarterly production meeting and discussing upco
ID: 397482 • Letter: K
Question
Kibby and Strand is holding its quarterly production meeting and discussing upcoming contracts and forecasts for future work. The operations manager (you) expresses concern that marketing is promising deliver dates to customers too quickly, and production may not be able to make those dates. The CEO replies, “having too many contracts is a good problem to have, so figure out how we meet those dates.” As you leave the meeting, you are saying to yourself, “If the CEO thinks it is easy then let her come down on the operations floor and see what I have to go through to produce and deliver products.”
This scenario is realistic. Not all CEOs are going to have personal experience in the day-to-day details required to manage operations. Many CEOs come up through marketing or the accounting /financial departments of a company and they never worked in production. In some cases, you have individuals who never worked in the company at all prior to being named CEO. Take John Sculley for example. He was the CEO of Apple from 1983-1993, and prior to that he was the president of Pepsi. Talk about different industries! Do you think Scully had detailed knowledge of how to manufacture computers or the culture prevalent in an IT company like Apple? The evidence would indicate he did not. Scully fired Steve Jobs, so that shows how different his business philosophies were from those of the Apple founder. The point being made is that often you find yourself in a situation where you know your job better than your leadership. If that happens embrace the opportunity. You are the expert, so show them you know how to get things done.
In this unit’s discussion you will have the opportunity to establish the production schedule based on incoming contracts, and forecast production. You will be making lots of decisions and there are impacts. Not all decisions are “Win-Win”. Some will be “Win-Lose” and the most onerous ones are “Lose-Lose”, in other words there is not a good outcome.
Initial Posting
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Students are to complete Module 3, Forecasting and Contracts (Scenario) in Practice Operations. Based on their observations in this scenario, and upon a careful review of the available literature, the student is to consider him or herself to be the Production Manager of Kibby and Strand, the company in the scenario.
Formulate a priority scheduling plan for managing the production of goods based on incoming contracts. Specifically, is first in-first out a sound approach? What about other priority schemes? In addition, document the maximum capacity of the production department and determine if receiving, production, or shipping is the rate limiting resource with regard to capacity.
Instruction Guidance: It would be prudent to consider content covered in chapters 5 and 6 of the textbook; however, there are many other useful resources available on the Internet and in the literature to support the construction of your action plan.
This plan should be prepared as a Microsoft™ Word document, and then attached to the unit discussion thread. There is no minimum or maximum in terms of the word count; however, the response should explicitly address all required components of this discussion assignment. The document should be prepared consistent with the APA writing style (6th edition) and reflect higher level cognitive processing (analysis, synthesis and or evaluation).
Explanation / Answer
Answer:
We have considered our self to be the Production Manager of Kibby and Strand, the company in this scenario. We have reviewed the business contracts for the delivery of goods as per the commitment of the marketing team to the customers. We have review all the contracts for delivery and we have come out with the total production plan based on the contracts with customers.
Now we are Formulating a priority scheduling plan for managing the production of goods based on incoming contracts as below
Business High Priority Contracts: We would like to amend the priority list based on any high priority contracts, so that the key contracts which are high priority, needs to be place in the priority list so that their priority can be matched as per the agreed timelines.
Commitment to Customers: We would like to amend the priority list based on commitment given to customers/as per contract commitments so that we can abide by the committed timelines of our marketing team to our customers.
Priority for Strategic Customers/contracts-We would like to give priority to strategic contracts or customers so that we can align our efforts with respect to the strategy of the organization.
Priority based on input from management teams: the prepared priority list is reviewed with the management and specially the CEO and marketing team so that we can take their inputs and revise the priority list and as per the revised priority list we will plan for the production.
We would like document the maximum capacity of the production department so that we can declare that this is the maximum capacity at the plant with 24*7 utilization.
We would like to keep focus that receiving of material should not impact the production, as raw material availability is a key requirement for the production. We want to keep the production as per plan and shipping as per plan so that it will not be a limiting factor for the business.
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