Office Equipment Inc. Case Study: Office Equipment Inc.

The company is considering a $50 cash-back guarantee on any orders that have delivery times longer than a specified maximum but are not sure what maximum time to guarantee. They would be willing to pay out the guarantee on no more than 3% of their deliveries. What time limit in whole days should they set for their guarantee?

Once an order has been processed that requires a visit from one of our field technicians and the due date has been scheduled the system gathers the contact number on the order and it is placed into an auto dialer queue. At 4:00PM customers will receive these calls and hear the following

The table 9 demonstrated how AFRICEL-TEMPO employee were dependable in handling customer service problems, the preference of the customers was good with 37.8% of the respondents, the rest 32.2% of the respondents said that the handling customer service problems was fairly good, 16.5 of

Customers must use the internet to fill out an online form to address their complaints or service needs. These forms are processed by employees in your department. Currently the turnaround time on any given form is between four to eight hours. This creates a number of other customer complaints. Project Call Center is designed to reduce this turnaround time by 75% by creating and staffing a call center in Tampa. Building acquisition, building renovations, building fit out, IT system upgrades, and hiring and training of staff are estimated to cost $8.5 million dollars. This $8.5 million dollars can be paid evenly in any two quarters in the next year. In addition, seven new employees will need to be hired at $40,000 burdened labor costs per year to staff the call center. Management of this project could easily be done with the current in-house staff. Most of the work of this project would be outsourced and will have minimal impact on day-to-operations.

NCB is a manufacturer and distributer of a wide range of office products. In Canada, NCB uses several distributers in different regions. One of the major distributers is Harrison Stationary and Office Supply LTD. Harrison had distributed NCB’S products for over 50 years and NCB was the largest supplier of Harrison. In January 2003 Harrison was acquired by the president of the company and four senior officers. Most of the acquisition cost was financed by bank loans. Since the acquisition, Harrison had difficulties to pay NCB for the goods and the account receivable reached to unacceptable level. In September 2005 the Harrison account was 156 days old and amounted to $ 4.4 million. In

This would allow ample time for triaging the cases, completing documents and discussing possible solutions with the customer. By making an appointment and discussing with the customer beforehand how much time will be allotted them should keep everyone on track and decrease wait times.

Assuming perfection (no busy-signals, no customer-abandons), a Customer-Svc Rep can handle (8 hrs) ÷ (130.65 sec) = 220.4 calls/day, or 206.6 calls/day with a 30-min break. A Data-Entry Operator can handle (8 hrs) ÷ (37.5 sec) = 768 calls/day, or 720 calls/day with a 30-min break.

Develop an activity-base cost system for Dakota Office Products based on Year 200 data. Calculate the activity cost-driver rate for each DOP activity in 2000.

Using the intercompany-billing rate per hour of $400 and the intercompany demand of 205 hours we calculate revenue and expenses.

The above mathematical analysis predicts what may happen if processing time was moved up from 11.00AM to 7.00AM. It is evident here that the average waiting time is reduced by 2 hours and 15 minutes as the wait time decreases from 3 hours to just 45 minutes. This should definitely prove to be beneficial to the company as it quickens the business process, reduces wait time, minimizes chances of a processing emergency and hopefully improves profitability. Therefore, under the light of the current information available, there is no reason why the processing time should not be moved up to 7.00 AM during at least the peak season. However, we think that another

Exhibit 1: The Prestige Telephone Company January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 Intercompany Hours Commercial Hours Total Revenue Hours Service Hours Available Hours Total Hours 206 123 329 32 223 584 181 135 316 32 164 512 223 138 361 40 143 544

2.   Mean service time = travel time + repair time = 1 + 1.5 = 2.5 hours

The ABC system will help management analyse the profitability of each customer and restore the profitability of the company. Allied needs to offer benefits such as modified compensation plan focused on growing customer revenue and profitability to help encourage sales behaviour. TFC is able to significantly improve profits by concentrating on individual account management which SBP is capable of by identifying service costs and calculate the contribution for each account and then rank the accounts according to profitable ones. TFC should charge its customers based on their service usage by using cost plus pricing. The customers would be charged based on the cost of product plus service charge based on SBP systems plus a mark-up so that it will be fair to customers that have the same sales but different level of service.

In this essay, two companies will be identified and described on how they utilize a queuing system. Only two of the four most basic waiting line structures will be discussed: single-server and multiple-server waiting lines. Since waiting is an integral part of many service related operations, it is an important area of analysis. Each queue system has its advantages and disadvantages, but with no doubt each company’s goal is to cut down on the waiting time and that customer returns. In particular, we examine their implementation of both processes and try to find solutions to improve the waiting line process.

In an ideal situation, customers would not have to wait for the delivery of products and services. However, in the real world, organizations cannot always match exact capability and demand; therefore, waiting is frequently inevitable while purchasing, especially in service marketing, as service firms can barely inventory their “stock” for sale at a later date (Lovelock, 1992, p.154). In general, waiting in lines – known as “queuing”, happens when the number of customers arrive at a facility exceeds the capability of the system to serve them (Lovelock & Wirtz, 2011, p.260). Basically, this essay will state the relationship between queuing and customer satisfaction, as well as relationship between customer satisfaction and