assignment and project

Question 1

Barbara Herdman is the manager of the marketing research department of J.E. Hall, Inc. She recently collected demand data for the last six years of a special product and then asked one of her associates, Mr. Brown, to forecast the data for the same past six years using the sales force composite method. The following data provide the details for Mr. Brown’s forecast:

Year	Actual demand	Mr. Brown’s forecast
1	490	492
2	510	503
3	535	512
4	560	578
5	590	580
6	630	620

Complete the following:

1. Forecast the demand for the seventh year using the exponential smoothing method with alpha = 0.4. Show all details clearly. Use the initial forecast for the first year (492).

2. Which of the above methods is more accurate using mean absolute deviation (MAD) criteria?

3. Barbara performed a regression analysis on the six-year data and established the following equation:

Demand = 456 + 28x(t) where tis the code for the year (t= 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6)

Forecast the demand for the seventh year using Barbara’s equation above.

Question 2

During registration at a university, students have their courses approved by the adviser. It takes the adviser an average of 2.8 minutes (exponentially distributed) to approve each schedule, and students arrive at the adviser’s office at the rate of 20 per hour (Poisson distributed).

Complete the following:

1. Compute the average time a student spends in the waiting line.

The registrar has received complaints from students about the length of time they must wait to have their schedules approved. The registrar is considering several ways to reduce the waiting time.

2. One way to reduce the waiting time is to assign some assistants to the adviser. Each such assistant would reduce the average time required to approve a schedule by 0.2 minutes, down to a minimum of 1.0 minutes. If this option is followed, how many assistants should the registrar assign to the adviser if he feels that a waiting time of 10 minutes is not unreasonable?

3. It has been noted that about one-fifth of the students fall under routine cases which they can themselves identify as routine. These routine cases take 1 minute to be served with negligible variance. Hence, one other way to reduce the waiting time is to provide an assistant who handles routine cases, while non-routine cases are handled by the adviser. Will this option be acceptable?

4. Yet another way is to provide additional advisers. Assuming that the average service time for each adviser is the same, how many advisers will be needed to bring the waiting time to 10 minutes or less?

Question 3

Complete the following:

Which three of Deming’s 14 points do you feel are the most critical to the success of a total quality management (TQM) programme? Why?

INDIVIDUAL PROJECT

The purpose of this simulation project is to provide you with an opportunity to use thePOM-QM for Windowssoftware to solve a forecasting problem.

POM-QM for Windowssoftware

For this part of this project, you will need to use thePOM-QM for Windowssoftware:

1. Read Appendix IV of theOperations Management(Heizer & Render, 2011) textbook.

2. Launch thePOM-QM for Windowssoftware and from the main menu selectModule, and thenForecasting.

3. Next, selectFile,New, andLeast Squares - Simple and Multiple regression.

Individual Project problem

1. Use the forecasting module that you opened in thePOM-QM for Windowssoftware to solve the case study on page 146 of the Heizer and Render (2011) textbook (Southwestern University). For this case study, you are required to build a forecasting model. Assume a linear regression forecasting model and build a model for each of the five games (five models in total) by using the forecasting module of the POM software.

2. Answer the three discussion questions for the case study, except the part requiring you to justify the forecasting technique (Heizer & Render, 2011, p.146), as linear regression would be used.