kaplan MT400 unit 8 assignment

Kaplan University School of Business

MT400

Unit 8 Assignment

Establishing Baselines and Assessing Success

In this Assignment, through the development of pilot studies and contingency plans, you will engage in developing the following professional competencies:

● Write an action plan

In this Assignment, you are going to evaluate a specific business process based on criteria detailed below. If you already have selected a business process, continue using that and skip to the next paragraph. If you have not yet selected the business processyou will use for these Assignments, then begin by selectingone. E-mail your instructor and clearly describe the objective of this process, the participants, and the strategic significance for the company. The business process you select must have a clear beginning and an end, with identifiable, specific steps. Your instructor will confirm that the process you selected is suitable, or ask you to select another one.

For this Assignment, write a paper that answers the following questions (use the subheadings/numbered questions below to organize your paper):

PART 1 – IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGIES

In the first section, you will use critical thinking skills to tackle the problem of revised process implementation. You will evaluate various implementation strategies and pick the best option for your project.

Analyze the suitability of the four implementation strategies discussed in your book to your project, determine the best one and describe how you would design the implementation for your specific process based on this strategy.

● For each strategyexplain the specific pros and cons of using it for yourproject. Do not simply repeat the generic pros/cons from the book- your analysis should be based on how each strategy applies to the process you selected and the nature of your selected organization. Discuss the makeup of your organization as well as the requirements of your process and anticipate how each strategy may experience difficulties.

● Select the one you think will work the best in your situation. Justify your selection.

● Explain how this strategy must be customized for your selected process.

Kaplan University School of Business

MT400

Unit 8 Assignment

How would you design the rollout process? What would be required for the success of this strategy when implementing your revised process?

PART 2 – ESTABLISHING BASELINES

To begin with, list three metrics that you think can help you quantify the performance of the current process. List and define the metrics clearly, explain why each metric is important in the assessment of the process and then give an example of the statistic units. For example, if your metric is “speed of processing” it may be defined by how quickly each employee audits a tax form, and the example would be that “on average you would expect 8 tax forms audited per hour.” If you have already done this in a previous Assignment, you may copy and paste a summary from that Assignment.

Then, revisit the metrics that you selected for your baseline. For each metric, clearly discuss the following:

1) Describe what the metric is: how is it calculated and used currently?

2) As far as being used as a justifiable project goal, what kind of a change in this metric would constitute success? How did you arrive at this figure? If this target change figure is not possible to estimate now, then describe how you would compute it if you were actually carrying out this project: who would be involved and where would the data come from?

PART 3 – CASE ANALYSIS

Read the following case study and answer the questions at the end.

In 2009 it was decided that ABC Tire Company would implement a BPM project with the following goals:

● Decrease the labor cost per tire and

● Increase profit from each tire sold by 5%.

To track the success (or failure) of the project they determined the following baseline data for 2009.

Kaplan University School of Business

MT400

Unit 8 Assignment

Total # of	Materials	Labor	Average	Average
Tires Sold	Cost Per	Cost Per	Retail	Profit Per
	Tire	Tire	Price	Tire
			Per Tire
22,594	$21.23	$12.67	$119.00	$85.10

After implementing the BPM project ABC Tire Company reviewed the value of the project after a year and identified the following information:

Total # of	Total Materials	Total Labor	Average
Tires	Cost	Cost	Retail
Sold			Price Per
			Tire
27,669	$533,450.00	$397,555.00	$122.13

Using the data provided above, calculate and fill in the following table (show all your work; completing the table without the calculations will result in no credit):

Materials	Labor	Average	% Increase	% Increase	% Increase
Cost Per	Cost	Profit Per	or	or	or Decrease
Tire	Per	Tire	Decrease in	Decrease in	in Average
	Tire		Materials	Labor cost	Profit Per
			cost Per	Per Tire	Tire
			Tire

Kaplan University School of Business

MT400

Unit 8 Assignment

After the table is complete, address the following questions:

1. Why is it important to ensure that the baseline data is accurate?

2. Was the project successful? Why or why not?

Directions for Submitting Your Project

Compose your Assignment as a Microsoft Word document and save it as

Username-MT400 - Assignment-Unit#.docx (Example: TAllen-MT400 Assignment-Unit 8.docx). Submit your file by selecting the Unit 8: Assignment

Dropbox by the end of Unit 8.

Grading note:In the grading rubric below, you will see a section on analysis andcritical thinking. The points in this section will partly be based on your ability to apply the concepts discussed in your Assignment to the specific circumstances and details of the process/organization you selected. Writing in general terms without applying the concepts and analyzing your specific project may get you points for content section, but you will lose points in the analysis section.

Review the grading rubric below before beginning this activity.

Assignment grading rubric = 120 points

Unit 8 Assignment: Establishing Baselines and Assessing Success

Content, Focus, Use of Text and Research:	Points	Points
	Possible	Earned
Analyzed the pros and cons of all four implementation	30
strategies with respect to selected process and justified the
best fit.
Selected and justified metrics to be used for establishing a	20
baseline.
Calculated the correct values for the table in question 3.	15
Answered the questions correctly in question 3.	15

Kaplan University School of Business

		MT400				Unit 8 Assignment
	Analysis and Critical Thinking
	Responses demonstrated critical thinking and analysis and	20
	exhibited application of information.
	Spelling, Grammar, APA Format
	Clear business writing. Spelling and grammar are	20
	acceptable. Effective use of APA. Followed the required
	format and instructions.
	Total		120