For the case-based questions, make sure you provide evidence from the case in support of your discussion; unsupported assertions will not improve your grade.
Answer all four questions. Provide a discrete answer for each of the questions. Please make sure to identify which question you are answering. Make sure you are answering all the parts of the questions that are asked; a well written response that does not answer all the parts of the question will produce a disappointing grade.
1) (20 Points) Critical Success Factors (CSF) are elements that are necessary for an organization or a project to attain its objectives. For example, Chief Executive support is a CSF for corporate sustainability programs.
Related to CSFs are Key Performance Indicators(KPI). KPIs are the fact-based measures of success for a CSF. KPIs are often quantitative but they can be qualitive as well. For example: Regular Chief Executive attendance at sustainability program project reviews might be one KPI for the level of Chief Executive support for a corporate sustainability program.
An engineer friend of mine is fond of saying You can have it fast, cheap, or good. Pick two. She is, somewhat facetiously, pointing out the tension between schedule attainment, budget attainment, and output quality in any project.
Timeboxing is a project management technique that allocates a fixed and maximum unit of time to an activity, called a timebox, within which planned activity takes place. Timeboxing typically simplifies scope and resource management in a project. Timeboxing is often used in Design Thinking projects. Your class team project was timeboxed; you were given a set amount of time and resources and left to manage scope and quality on your own.
Scenario: You have been assigned as the team lead for a timeboxed Design Thinking project with a fixed deadline and project team. This dramatically simplifies the management of schedule and budget attainment for the project. What is much more open-ended is the management of the quality of the output of the project. You understand that you need to focus on quality to avoid delivering to use my engineer friends model- fast and cheap but not good. You also understand that due to the nature of Design Thinking projects, the quality of the output of one step directly impacts your ability to produce quality outputs in the following steps: garbage out for one step is garbage in for the next step.
Assignment: Describe the CSF(s) and related KPI(s) that you would use to manage the quality of the output for each step of your Design Thinking project. In doing so, a by-product of your answer should be a demonstration of your understanding of the Design Thinking method.
Caution: Your CSFs and KPIs should be useful for the management of the project during the project so that you can take corrective action, if needed, based on your reading of your KPI(s) during the project. Avoid CSFs or KPIs that can only be measured after the completion of the project, for example, product success in the market or customer satisfaction survey results with the final product.
2) (20 Points) Saint Gobain High Performance Plastics produces architectural plastics for projects such as radar domes and large pavilion-style architecture. They also produce robust industrial plastics for applications such as conveyer belts in hostile environments such as extreme temperatures, extreme temperature changes or constant exposure to various kinds of radiation. Saint Gobain offers a portfolio of standard products to the marketplace to support customer projects. St. Gobain products are built on a make-to-order basis with an average lead time of three weeks. Saint Gobain also has the capability to design one-off products to customer specifications; these engineer-to-order products represent a small fraction of the business (less than 10%) but they are high profit margin sales. Lead-times on ETO orders vary and can be as long as twelve weeks, depending on design complexity and engineering capacity.
Their manufacturing process is highly capital-intensive consisting of three types of equipment:
Three industrial looms for weaving the substrate weave for their products out of various types of thread. There are a relatively small number of different substrate weave and each form of substrate weave can be used in multiple products. Set up times and tear down for product change overs for the looms are typically in the range of two hours. Substrate is manufactured in quantities to meet the requirements of the Tower operations and is stored in rolls. The Industrial looms were purchased from a textile manufacturer that was closing and are more than eighty years old. Saint Gobain has trained technicians to maintain them.
Six Towers five-story high, purpose-built machines that are used to apply coatings to the substrate weave and then bake the coatings to create the plastic. The towers are enormous and occupy the majority of the floorspace in the factory. Each of the St, Gobain product offerings requires a different coating. Because of the long (on average four hours) set-up and tear down times required for product changeovers; these machines produce thousands of yards of product per run which are stored in rolls. Each tower cost more than $2.5M to purchase and install.
Cutting Operations: The rolls are then cut to customer specifications which are provided at time of order. St. Gobain maintains one cutting workstation. Set-up times for the cutting operations are relatively short; typically, less than an hour and the run times for the cutting operation for a customer order is typically less than three hours.
Saint Gobain services all its demand by shipping from its warehouse that is co-located with the factory.
One key customer segment for Saint Gobain is the food preparation industry; they have a line of products that are FDA approved as cook safe. To-date these cook safe plastics have only been marketed to industrial firms in the food processing business. Saint Gobain has a new opportunity. McDonalds has invited Saint Gobain to bid on the manufacture of the grill sheets that would be used in cooking the hamburgers in every one of the growing network of more than 40,000 McDonalds restaurants worldwide. Over the last fifteen years the McDonalds network has grown by two percent per year.
Grill sheets are reusable non-stick cooking surfaces that prevent the hamburger patty from sticking to the grill during cooking. St. Gobains design engineers have reviewed the specifications and are certain that one of the existing cook safe formulations can be applied with only minor changes to the Tower set-up and processing. The specification calls for one grill sheet per grill and one spare grill sheet per restaurant with a useful life of at least three months in a commercial application. Most McDonalds restaurants have two grills.
One key requirement of the McDonalds bid would be that Saint Gobain would commit to same day pick up by McDonalds 3PL partners for McDonalds orders. McDonalds 3PL partners manage distribution to the individual restaurants.
Evaluate the supply chain impact of this new opportunity by identifying potential changes to the:
(a)PLAN, (b)MAKE, (c) DELIVER processes that would be required to execute on this opportunity.
(d) What are your key considerations in developing the recommendation would you make with respect this opportunity?
Note: this case is a fictionalized account of an actual business opportunity.
3) (20 Points)Discuss four key value chain design decision points an enterprise must address in designing the value chain in which it participates.
Illustrate your discussion of each point by comparing any two of the following case studies discussed in the class: Amazon, Apple, Cisco, John Deere, McDonalds, Phillips, Rumo, or Unilever.
In answering this question, you should have four paired comparisons (one pair for each decision point discussed). Do not use the same pair of companies for more than one comparison; you can use a company in more than one comparison.
4) (20 Points) Pleasant Valley Yard Products, located in Cedar Rapids, Iowa manufactures multiple lines of leisure products for outside use. They offshore outsource most of the components of their products and assemble them in the United States. One of the key components for their most popular product line is the pressure gauge that all their outdoor gas stove products share. In total they plan to use 350,000 gauges a year and they source their gauges from the Zhnggu Cling Corporation in Shenzhen, China for $8.29 per unit. Recently, due to the shortage of ocean freight containers, the ordering costs for these gauges has jumped from $2900 per order to $3500 per order (FOB Shanghai). Shipping from Shanghai to Los Angeles by ocean freight usually takes from 14 up to 40 days.
The CEO of US Gauge Corporation, based in Iowa City, Iowa has reached out to Pleasant Valley with an offer to supply the gauges. US Gauge can supply the gauges for a cost of $8.49 per unit but can guarantee an ordering cost of $100 per order by offering Kanban procurement and covering the freight costs by using their local truck fleet. (DAP Buyer Location). Based on their offer, US Gauge can commit to a two-day lead time. The US Gauge offer is contingent upon a guarantee of a full year of volume.
Inventory carrying cost for Pleasant Valley Yard Products is 29%.
A) Which alternative is advantageous from a total cost perspective? (Make sure to show your work; answers without supporting detail will receive partial credit)
B) Which alternative would you recommend and what would you base your recommendation on?
Note: this case is entirely fictional
Last Completed Projects
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