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Essay on Kristen's Cookies

Decent Essays

Operations Management
Fall 2013

Kristen’s Cookie Company September 26, 2013

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.

i) Identify the items, resources, and the tasks. Draw a process flow diagram for this process.

Items:

Cookie Ingredients
Cookie Dough
Baked Cookies …show more content…

This would introduce inefficiency into the process and most likely impact receipt of future orders.

v) We need to consider business strategy: will the process capacity be higher if Kristen offers only non-customized cookies of one type? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this alternative strategy compared to what Kristen now plans?

The process capacity will not change in the short term if Kristen offers only non-customized cookies. The case study makes it clear that the process that Kristen follows requires specific amounts of time to be spent at each step. However, in the long term, Kristen’s capacity will increase as she becomes more adept at making the one type of cookie she has elected to make. This will reduce the time required at some of the process steps (but not necessarily all) and ultimately increase the output capacity her and her roommate are able to achieve.

Pros of non-customized cookies:
Time spent shopping will be reduced, as will overall variability in price of ingredients.
Kristen and her roommate will become more efficient due to standardization
They will become much better at making one type of cookie rather than many; total flow time will

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