Exam 16: Operations Management: Putting It All Together

Computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) takes the electronic design for a product and creates the programmed instructions that robots must follow to produce that product as efficiently as possible.

As a general location factor, which of the following is one of the reasons firms seek overseas sites for manufacturing?

Green practices include designing facilities to be more energy efficient; using renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, or geothermal power when possible; making use of recyclable materials; switching to paints that are less harmful to the environment.

Tony oversees the activities in creating the right goods and services in the right quantities and distributing them to the right customers. His decisions have a major impact on both the revenue and costs his firm incurs, and therefore on the firm's financial success. This is an example of operations management.

MicroMaster advertises that its computers are backed by 24/7 toll-free technical support. However, in order to meet its goal of keeping costs as low as possible, MicroMaster located its support function in a foreign country and staffed it with a small number of poorly trained employees who had (to Canadian ears) heavy foreign accents. Thus, when customers call the support line, they often must wait on hold. Then they find themselves speaking to someone who often can't answer their questions even if the customer could understand what the tech support person was trying to say in the first place. Which of the following appears to be the case with MicroMaster?

Although enterprise resource planning software is very easy to implement, once it is in place many organizations find it difficult to use because it makes data entry much more complex.

An example of product layout is an assembly line where the product being produced moves from one station to another in a fixed sequence.

Operations managers at Marcus Industries agree that the company is trying to handle too many supply chain functions on its own, resulting in the inefficient use of resources. This suggests that the firm may soon embark on what type of strategy?

Given the nature of their products, many service firms base their facility location decisions primarily on which of the following?

In project scheduling terminology, what do we call activities that must be completed before other activities can begin?

Which of the following is something a firm must do in order to receive ISO 14001 certification?

The selection of the best type of process for a given type of production is influenced by the cost of production and the degree to which the output is customized.

Which of the following is the set of strategies and practices to eliminate waste?

In operations management, quality is defined in terms of which of the following?

One weakness of the critical path method is that it doesn't provide a way to determine the sequence in which the activities involved in a project must be performed.

Goods are considered tangible, while services are considered intangible.

W. Edwards Deming and other quality experts had their greatest initial impact on companies located in which country?

An example of lean production is WestJet's decision to use many types of aircrafts but fly them each only once per week.

The Deming Chain Reaction refers to the compounding of interest that explains why a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow.

Process layout arranges equipment according to the type of task performed.