Pom 345 Exercise 1

01/30/15

2.
The three important functional areas of business organizations
are finance, operations, and marketing. These three areas are very
interrelated so that with out one the rest would fall apart. Marketing
creates demand for the product, while operations creates the product,
and finance ensures that optimal performance is being met with the
right budget and bills are being paid. So, it is clear that if one of these
were cut from an organization the other two would not function
properly and the business would fail.
3.
The operation function is to manage all of the companies
systems and processes that create goods and services. This includes
controlling the inputs, process, and outputs of the company. The
operations manager must also deal with legal departments,
accounting, MIS, HR, and public relations to keep the organization
moving smoothly.
4.
Some major differences between good and services are: Goods
are tangible while services are intangible, customer contact is low with
goods but high with services, uniformity is high with goods but low with
services, and inventory is high with goods and low with services. Some
topics that affect both include training, HR, customer service,
equipment repair, procurement, and administrative activities.
10. Craft production is a system where highly skilled workers used
simple, flexible tools, to produce small quantities of customized goods.
Mass production is a system in which low skilled workers used
specialized machinery to produce high volumes of standardized goods.
Lean production is a system that uses minimal amounts of resources,
highly skilled workers to produce high volumes of high quality good
with some variety.
11. Workers in a lean system may not like it because more
responsibility is placed on the worker to anticipate a problem before it
happens and improve the system working in groups. More emphasis is
placed on the group getting as much done as possible than on
individual creativity. The workers must be involved in the planning and
correction stages of production. The great amount of responsibility and
pressure leads to high level of anxiety than other systems.
12. a. It is key in an organization to match supply and demand. This
is so because having excess supply is wasteful and costly to the
company while having to little means a lost opportunity and customer
dissatisfaction. When supply and demand match the most is made out
of the companies resources while making a profit and satisfying the
consumer.

b. Managing a supply chain ensures the business is running

smoothly. In the past supply chain management was not seriously
looked into and as a result problems ranging to oscillation of
inventories, inventory stock outs, late deliveries, and quality problems
resulted. When managed the correctly the following elements are all
interconnected: customers, forecasting, design, capacity planning,
processing, inventory, purchasing, suppliers, location, and logistics.