Overview/Directions
This is an individual project, no teams allowed.
Answer the following questions for Chapters 12 through 14. These are taken directly from textbook, with additional comments and data needed to answer the questions. Answer each question with a well thought out supporting explanation, proper grammar, and any data you may need to explain your position. You can use the studies and data from the textbook to support your answers. Any references to other resources, including classmates will not be allowed.
The questions have the following point distributions and instructions:
- Save this file with the naming convention provided in the syllabus.
- Provide your explanations along with any supporting data in this file.
- Include approximately four (4) sentences or less of explanation for each question.
- You can use, but should not need, Excel to generate your answers. Feel free to submit any supporting Excel files, but not required for the project.
1. If you are creating a model and one of the key considerations is which port of entry you should use, why would you model the port like you would model a warehouse? What costs would be relevant for picking which port to use?
2. You are creating a model for a manufacturing company with four major plants and ten warehouses. They want to reduce costs by determining the optimal number and location of the plants and warehouses. During the initial set of meetings, one of the team members is very concerned about modeling the "samples" that the firm sends out. As part of the marketing of the product, the firm sends out quite a bit of sample product. This product is pulled from the plants or warehouses and shipped to customers via small-parcel. It accounts for about 10% of the demand records (and about 0.5% of the demand volume) and about 3% of the logistics costs. Should you include this part of the business in the model?
3. You are starting a network modeling project. When you ask the project manager what the objective of the study is, you get the answer, "We want to optimize the entire end-to-end supply chain." Why doesn't this answer help you? What additional information do you need?
4. You are working for a company with 500 unique products. You must aggregate these products. The team has decided that they will build a simple way to group products by coming up with six categories. Each category only has three choices. They will apply the categories sequentially. For example, they first break the products into Large, Medium, and Small.Then for each size, they break into Red, Yellow, and Blue; for each color, they break into three more subcategories; and so on for the six categories. What is wrong with this approach?
5. If you are considering closing a warehouse and opening a new one, what people in the organization might be impacted and how might they react to the project? Select two (2) functional groups within the organization and explain why they would be impacted.