Nichols Company

1) Issue – The team wants to develop new ventures and wants to keep it in house. They realize that everyone has things that they are working on. They start thinking of pulling warehouse staff to assist with order fulfillment, but right away Maria says no that it is not cost efficient to outfit them with new hardware. The

Winery company has faced some issues in which that has affected their business. Thank you for having us as mentors to review the issues at Roberts Cellars Company. We carefully studied the case of the situation at Roberts Cellars Company during our meeting. We as one group figured out that the problem at Roberts Cellars Company is the TCA a chemical that can cause musty odors and flavors in wine. TCA infects the cork, then is transferred to the wine when it comes into contact with the cork.

The company believes that new initiatives are necessary to bolster unit volume and especially reorders. I believe Advanced Materials lacks coherent strategy for Nundies to effectively appraise the financial worth of product service offerings. The managers must reduce the spending on order getting costs because they cannot increase their output to the capped limit of 100,000 liners. Other issues are whether or not the distribution approach currently used by the company will help reach profitability, and whether or not the company effectively reaches the target market.

While we are performing our analysis on different aspects of the company, we look at the three main types of cost. When we remain devoted to improving our costs, and the faults related, we show our same devotion to our consumers. This is portrayed by the quality of products we put on the shelves. Prevention costs, appraisal costs and Failure costs are areas

Peter’s Peripherals assembles multimedia upgrade kits --- sets of components for adding sound and video to desktop computers. The demand for their kits for the next four quarters is estimated in the table below. Unit manufacturing cost for each kit is $160. Holding costs on each kit is $80 per quarter. Any kit that must be delivered late is assessed a backorder cost of $120. Each worker is capable of finishing 10 kits per quarter. If the company chooses to vary work force levels, it will incur costs of $400 for each additional worker; $600 for each termination. The company currently has 28 employees.

The Theory of Constraints indicates that excess capacity from ‘subordinate’ departments should be utilized to lessen the strain on the bottlenecked department. Until the constraint on production has been removed management should subordinate everything else to the constraint. The proposed action of outsourcing inspection from the coating and sharpening department will free-up more valuable direct labor hours in the area of constraint. A separate inspection station before the final stage of production should be added to the production process. An employee from the chemical bathing stage will be cross-trained to inspect products as needed for the brief periods of inspection required. Because the second process has been deemed subordinate to the area experiencing constraint its excess capacity can be utilized in a more valuable capacity. Each additional hour in the coating and sharpening process will result in a firm benefit of $1250, or the contribution margin per unit of constraint for the Model C210. The addition of an inspection

Arnold and Kunzler will meet on August 4 to search for an agreement about the wage

The company started off producing 20,000 units of mountain bikes. We did not change the production quantity. Last year our forecast sales were 24,000 when we only sold 19,866; therefore we thought it would be best to leave production at 20,000 bikes. Having excess inventory, we concluded that 20,000 units should be enough considering our quality has not changed and our advertising will not increase the sales dramatically. Although we had the choice to produce as much as 30,000 units, we felt as though we did not have sufficient money to increase production. We were interested in allocating the money towards marketing as opposed to production. We realized that without awareness, no matter how many units we make, sales would be inefficient.

Going into 2004, Bob Moyer planned to produce 10,000 bicycles at Mile High Cycles. Construction of his bicycles includes the utilization of three departments, frames, wheel assembly, and final assembly. During this year, Mile High Cycles ended up actually producing 10,800 bicycles to meet higher than expected demand. Bob is curious as to whether or not he was successful in maintaining costs to meet these higher levels of demand.

Andres was forced to import product from French division as he ran out of capacity several times due to new machines performing inadequately. This added an overhead expense of approximately 2147 (Additional maintenance costs + Transfer costs)

One of the main concerns during the meeting was the impact of cost and time constraints on networking techniques and project schedules. Under the ideal situation, the project start and end dates are fixed. Adding resources is not usually feasible as it increases cost. There should be a balance between time and cost constraints as it avoids wasting of resources. Also most people are willing to accept that costs could exceed expectations, and might even take a perverse delight in recounting past examples, the same is not true for time constraints. This is probably due to the fact that cost over runs are resolved in-house, while schedule issues are open and visible to the customer. A company has a lot of useful, desirable work that could be done, but has limited and finite resources available with which to do that work. Choices have to be made about which work to do and how to allocate resources. This leads to constraints especially, the time constraint and the cost constraint. Time, in project management, is analyzed down to its smallest detail. Each and every component of the project is analyzed with respect to the time required for completion. After completion of this analysis these components are broken down even further into the time required to do each task.

|250000 indirect employees & 9000 vehicle for distribution). |position in profitability due to drop in prices by nearly 30% since 1950’s. |

Excellent customer service is a way to set the organization apart from its competitors. Differentiation can be achieved through fast and correct execution of product ordering. To improve on the order process it is important to have the correct information provided in a timely fashion to all divisions. For integration to be successful information must be available throughout the entire supply chain.

New England Seafood Company executives face a potential two-stage plan to move into the freshwater catfish market because of the banned oyster harvesting along much of the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, and increased competition from foreign producers.  These factors have resulted in significantly lower yields for New England Seafood.  In order to stay in business, New England Seafood Company needs to look at harvesting and processing something other than seafood.  New England Seafood Company looks to

First, we have identified if there is really an insufficiency in the amount of selling prices set by the Sales Department, in reference to Exhibit 1 of the case. We did this through identifying the maximum amount of overhead costs that the company can incur for the three products and comparing it with the total overhead costs. See Table 1 for details.