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Essay on Nature of customer demand within a company

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Part One

A)
The general nature of the funeral business is to some degree incredibly uncertain. There is no guaranteed way of forecasting future work as there is no guarantee that death rates in the area will remain the same year on year due to various factors e.g. general health in the area, local disasters, poverty rates etc. For the purpose of this report the focus will not be on the funeral business as a whole but on one area of sales – monumental masonry.

The nature of customer demand – volume, variety and uncertainty

Month on month the monumental masonry side of the business will complete, on average, 40 monumental orders – 75% of this work will be new work that has come from funerals that the business has recently …show more content…

This generally works by use of medium term capacity planning whereby using historical data and current number of funerals to be carried out the manager can somewhat anticipate the demand and therefore ensure that current work is completed in time so that there will not be a back log of orders. However due to fluctuations in demand short term capacity adjustments will sometimes have to be made to ensure that work is carried out at a quicker rate in during the busier periods (in this case December). When fluctuations in demand occur to a level that the business cannot cope with then the work will be sub-contracted to another business to help cope with said demand. This also helps in keeping the costs of staff down, momentary fluctuations in demand will not require the use of extra/temporary staff if the work can be completed elsewhere to the same standard of quality.

The weather can create problems in terms of fixing monuments in the required cemetery/churchyard, particularly during the winter months. Therefore it is expected that if the weather has been particularly bad on some days and the process of fixing monuments could

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