Exam 2: Process Strategy and Analysis

A toaster is an example of flexible automation.

Suppose you have owned and operated your own package delivery business for a year. You would like to engage in competitive benchmarking to make sure your business is run as smoothly as possible. What firms and processes would you consider for benchmarking? Defend your choices of these firms and processes. What specific metrics would you focus on and why? How could the data be reliably collected at your own business?

Provide examples for each of the three types of benchmarking.

A team consisting of members from each functional area affected by the process change is referred to as a(n):

What are three principles of process strategy that should govern choices that process designers make? Provide examples of well-conceived process strategy choices to illustrate each of your three principles.

Scenario 2.3 A job consists of three elements. Twenty observations for each element were timed, and the resulting data are shown in the following table. A performance rating has also been assigned for each element, as shown in the table. The job has an allowance of 15% of normal time. -Use the information in Scenario 2.3. What is the normal time for job element #1?

What are the different dimensions of customer contact in service processes? Provide an example of a service that has high levels of customer contact and one that has very low levels of customer contact.

Which of the following statements about customer involvement is best?

A work sampling method is used to determine the proportion of the time a machine is idle. The following information was gathered on a random basis. What is the proportion of idle time observed for this machine?

Comment on the need for flexibility in both the workforce and capital equipment. What process types and production situations require greater flexibility?

A(n) ________ means that a department focuses on its own tasks without understanding the role and processes of departments outside its own organizational boundaries.

Capital intensive automation is appropriate for both high and low volume operations.

The semester project came back from the copy store and to her horror, the project leader has just noticed that the left side y-axis of a key Pareto chart was cut off due to a printing error. The bar chart component uses the missing left side y-axis and the cumulative percentage line on the Pareto chart uses the right side y-axis. The project leader is pretty sure that the total number of observations in all combined categories is 200. Can you help her develop estimates of the counts for each of the five categories?

The first unit of production takes 12 hours to produce and the learning rate is expected to be 80 percent. How long will it take to produce the sixth unit?

Formal work measurement techniques estimate average times for each step in a process by relying on the judgment of skilled observers.

Which of these questions is not one of the initial round questions typically used to uncover opportunities during a process redesign?

A pilot work study has been conducted on a new operation with four work elements. The following times, in seconds, were obtained using a time study. a. What is the normal time for this operation? b. If an allowance of 20 percent is used, what is the standard time for this task?

The best data analysis tool for recording which gas pump most customers use would be a checklist.

The ________ can be represented by a line called a learning curve.

A restaurant manager tracks complaints from the diner satisfaction cards that are turned in at each table. The data collected from the past week's diners appear in the following table. Using a classic Pareto analysis, what bottom categories comprise about 20% of the total complaints?