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
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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
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.
A child came up to me today and ask me if he swallows a cookie what all happens to it. Once it enters the mouth, chemical and mechanical steps work to break the cookie into smaller pieces and remove its nutrients for use by the body. Tracing the digestion of a cookie involves a quick trip down your esophagus, a churn in the stomach and a slow, winding movement through the intestines.
If the company we outsource with has some sort of issue with its equipment or is running behind schedule it will delay our orders and reflect poorly upon our company. If we choose not to do anything we will continue running at inefficient levels costing us more and more money as time goes on.
* Time wasted unsorting orders. The order and paperwork should somehow be kept together in order to eliminate this requirement.
If the operation have not reordered all the goods they need, this can lead to irritated customers and lower revenue for the operation.
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).
* Independent variable coefficient – This is the measured effect the independent variables have on the dependent variable. This is the main output of the regression analysis.
Looking at the diagram, from time (23 to 25), I will be involved in the packing of cookies for the first batch. However, I will also be involved in the mixing of ingredients for the third batch. It is not possible for me to be able to do two jobs at the same time; therefore either the third batch of cookies will be delayed or the
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
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How many orders can you fill in a night, assuming that you are open four hours each night?