Kristen’s Cookie Company

The main goal of the Cookies unit was to solve the Unit Problem. The unit problem introduced us to the Woos, the owners of a cookie bakery. The Woos want to find the most profitable combination of plain and iced cookies to bake and sell in their store. We were given several constraints for this problem. According to the Woo’s recipes, a dozen normal cookies requires one pound of cookie dough, and a dozen iced cookies requires .7 pounds of cookie dough. The Woo family only has 110 pounds of cookie dough in stock, which will affect the number of cookies that can be made. The iced cookies also need icing, obviously. A dozen of iced cookies required .4 pounds of icing and the Woos only have 32 pounds of icing in stock.

Imagine that you have decided to open a small ice cream stand on campus called "Ice-Campusades." You are very excited because you love ice cream (delicious!) and this is a fun way for you to apply your business and economics skills! Here is the first month's scenario--you order the same number (and the same variety) of ice creams each day from the ice cream suppliers, and your ice creams are always marked at $1.50 each. However, you notice that there are days when ice creams remain unsold but other days when there are not enough ice creams for the number of customers.

6. There are a few changes we can make to the process to increase efficiency. Buying another oven (of the same size) that allows you to put in 2 trays during the Load&Bake process will increase the process from 22 dozens to 30 dozens or 26.6% after four hours. Also, by having customer pay during the packing period (2 minutes), we would circumvent time wasted in the pay period (1minute).

Assuming that we add another oven, the cycle time of the ovens would be 5 minutes. The new bottleneck for the entire process would now be that of mixing the ingredients and dishing the cookies onto the tray, a process which takes 8 minutes for 1 batch of cookies.

I. Executive Summary II. Situation Analysis o Market Summary  Target Market Demographics  Geographic  Demographics  Behavior Factors Market Needs Market Trends Market Growth o SWOT Analysis  Strengths  Weaknesses  Opportunities  Threats o Competition o Product Offering o Keys to Success o Critical Issues III. Marketing Strategy o Mission o Marketing Objectives o Financial Objectives o Target Markets o Positioning o Strategies o Marketing Mix o Marketing Research o Action Plan IV. Financials o o o V. Controls o o o VI. Summary Implementation Marketing Organization Contingency Planning Breakeven Analysis Sales Forecast Expense Forecast

1. The local Mastermind store sells innovative educational toys. Part of their service is giving advice to customers about the best toys for a particular age group, which requires having more customer service representatives in the store. During the month long Christmas buying season, it makes half of its $500,000 yearly sales. Its contribution margin on average is 40% and its fixed costs for the year are about $150,000. The owner believes that she could make even higher sales, if she had more customer service representatives on the floor during the peak season. She plans on hiring four more people for 200 hours each at $20 per hour. How much additional revenue does she have earn to the nearest dollar

"Suppose you own a McDonald’s franchise; a teenage cook makes ten hamburgers per hour for you, and each hamburger is sold for $2. Your hourly business revenue from hiring that cook is $20, i.e., price times the cook’s output. Suppose all other costs add up to $12 per hour of production, and the minimum wage you pay the cook is $5 per hour. Then your hourly profit from hiring that cook is $3 [$20 - $5 - $12]. Now suppose all costs a prices double, that is, a hamburger fetches $4, the minimum wage becomes $10, and other costs rise to $24.

e) Maintenance contracts - Maintenance costs should be included as incremental cash flows because they could change the NPV of the project if the maintenance costs are significantly different for each of the different projects.

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.

A long-time friend insists that Natalie has to somehow include cookies in her business plan. After a series of brainstorming sessions, Natalie settles on the idea of operating a cookie-making school. She will start on a part-time basis and offer her services in

Also, according to break-even analysis operating with the single mold and excluding warehousing costs, a minimum of 12,035 units must be sold to break even. Under a similar situation with the double mold, 15,507 units must be sold to break even, which is about half of the optimistic sales projection. Also under the optimistic sales projection, a positive return on investment is expected. Because the company is turning profit,less additional investment is required. Additionally under the pessimistic and expected situation, the company turns losses, and under the optimistic projections, Chef’s Toolkit only has a net income of 13% of its revenues. Selecting Preferred alternative According to the above information and the projected pro-forma statements, Dale Reid should not invest his money in the company. The company’s lack of current assets, high expenses and low per-unit revenue create an unfortunate and unprofitable investment in pessimistic and expected situations. Only in the optimistic production and sales does the company begin to turn profit, but this profit is low. Chef’s Toolkit needs desperate restructuring and additional revenue sources before Dale Reid should invest. Developing

Kristen and her roommate are preparing to launch Kristen’s Cookie Company in their on-campus apartment. The company will provide fresh cookies to hungry students late at night. Evaluation of the preliminary design for the company’s production process will be required in order to make key policy decisions, including what prices to charge, what equipment to order and how many orders to accept, and to determine whether the business can be profitable.

The processor is required for mixing the ingredients for the cookies and is idle for most of the time. The oven required for the purpose of baking is the major bottleneck and there is no requirement for more than one processor. Hence, spending money on more than one processor would not be advisable for Kristen 's Cookie Company.

With one faster convection oven, we can repeat the procedure as for a single oven (using the Gantt chart). The first dozen starts baking in the convection oven at the 9th minute and finishes baking at the 15th minute. Meanwhile the second dozen is ready to go into the oven. The RM sets the timer in 1 minute and the baking process for the second dozen starts at the 16th minute and ends at the 22nd minute. Meanwhile, there is just enough time for the first dozen to cool and be packed. At the end of 22nd minute, the RM unloads the second dozen, lets it cool for 5 minutes and packs them taking 2 more minutes. The order is ready by 29th minute at which time it is delivered and payment is accepted, giving a total theoretical flow time of 30 minutes.

Although the oven only holds one tray per time, it takes 6 minutes to washing and mixing steps. So we still need 3 trays to be well-prepare.