1. What caused the difficulties that the JITD program was created to solve? The problems that JITD intended to solve: ● Demand fluctuation: Barilla suffered increasing operational efficiencies and cost penalties that resulted from large week to week variations in its distributors’ order patterns. According to the Exhibit 12 , the demand variability was huge so it was very difficult for the whole supply chain to forecast the demand and order accordingly. ● Furthermore, the production line of Barilla had a long setup/change process and was highly automated as well.
Modern generation’s dependence on Technology Human in the modern technology have become too dependent on technology. This is because technology has spread to every part of the world. The modern world is experiencing global change on people’s lifestyle and the way they live. They are faced with numerous challenges in their daily activities as they try to succeed in their undertakings. This has made humans in the world to become too dependent in technology in their daily lives.
30) Before this technology usage, Supervalu manually managed its high volume of traffic and logistical operations. There were often inefficient load movements and it took time to correct the errors due to the lack of visibility in the shipping operations. Trying to find the solution to stop these errors and proceed with
Moreover, the production of this type of motors was long run, which means this process needed much labor costs and spend a lot of time to produce one. In the meanwhile, due to this problem, EMW cannot lower their costs sufficiently to compete with other competitors who was relatively on a lower rate of labor costs. Therefore, the manager had to redesign a new strategy to gain profit. They found EMW had advantages on producing low volume, customized A/C motors, and this process of production was short run, but needed high level of automated machines and this cost a lot of money. According to this new strategy, EMW had devised a new costing system to make profit.
This was a very complex task considering the numerous combinations of hardware and software components available. Competitors were often unable to successfully develop a strategy that minimized the high manufacturing, carrying, and inventory costs associated with the product life cycle. Computer makers often focused on minimizing one associated cost instead of fully integrating a system that considered lowering every expense. Also, technology was constantly changing throughout this time period. PC competitors were constantly investing capital into new products and services to remain competitive in the market.
In the middle sized firm like NIBCO, in which the importance of manual labor is very crucial, the management of this manual labor and the entire management and the implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning plays a very vital role. Prior to 1995, NIBCO implemented Information System within the company and that turned out to be a not go good success. It was outdated and was incompetent with the company's ever increasing market sales. Then the company's management team has come up with a conclusion that a crucial step has to be taken in order to rectify the current supply chain information system. I would say that this was a typically necessary step that has to be taken to assure effective integration among the plants within the company.
QUESTION 1 Medtronic enjoyed 70% of the market share through the 1960s, taking advantage of its position as first entrant into the pacemaker field. However, in the 1970s and 1980s, the market became highly competitive with the rapid technological change as well as the demands for product quality became very tightening, and the competitors proved much faster than Medtronic at developing new products. Several key employers even left Medtronic and moved to start-ups seeking greater opportunity to develop their new pacemaker product ideas. We defined three root causes of why Medtronic lost its leading position. The first root cause is that there was no single process or person in the organization to articulate the company’s strategy of new product development.
Chapter 30 Factory system: The factory system replaced both the putting out system and proto industrial factories and was the characteristic method of production in industrial economies. Many of the new machines being made were too large and expensive for household use and were required to be in a bigger building. Engineers and entrepreneurs began to make complicated machines for large scale production. The significance of the factory system was it brought together more workers doing specialized tasks than ever before. It created jobs for people who never used to be able to work in the factory setting because the workers were required to do one task instead of the whole job.
1) What problems was Border States Industries encountering as it expanded? What people, organization, and technology factors were responsible for these problems? Border States Industries expanded as a result of their new business line and also due to extensive growth from their core business of wholesale distribution. BSE’s existing system at that time known as Rigel was designed only for electrical wholesalers and it did not fit into BSE’s requirements anymore. This is the technology factor that contributed to BSE’s problem.
Intel was also faced with hyper competition as many of their rivals; particularly Advanced Micro Devices were producing a faster, cheaper and better quality chip. Intel’s reputation was also floundering due to product delays, recalls and shortages and worse of all, bugs in their software. It would appear from this case study that Barrett was forced to deal with internal pressures of growth, re-establishment of organizational identity and integration and collaboration efforts. Barrett was involved in continuous shuffling of exec to get the new structure to work and there were lot of job cuts. He strategically invested in R&D in order to cut chip making cost which will in turn lead to his goal of curtailing cost and increase sales to promote growth.