Biddy's Bakery: Operations Management
Case: Biddy’s Bakery Chapter 3, Operations Management
1. Elizabeth’s largest challenge considering her capacity needs, is that she outgrew her first facility’s capacity and then decided to move to a much larger facility where she realized she had considerably more capacity than needed for her business. Elizabeth is essentially paying for a facility she is not utilizing fully; therefore her sales expectations are not being met because of the bills she needs to pay with unused space. Elizabeth should have researched more into the facility layout before deciding to up and move her business to a new location. With considering this first, she could have accurately decided if the new building was the right fit for the arrangement of resources in the facility to enhance the producing process.
2. The proposal the business students at the university made for Elizabeth might not be the correct structure for her business due to the layout they are proposing involving a repetitive operation design. With a repetitive operation, the product variety is low, the degree of standardization is high, and the throughput time is shorter. These are all characteristics that would not fit the business for a bakery. Her operation is Intermittent. A bakery is labor-intensive, because of the specialized orders taken by customers that Elizabeth and her business takes pride in. The workers need to be able to perform different tasks, depending on the processes needed of the products being produced. The student’s just proposing the production of the McDoogle pie in large volumes, changes Elizabeth’s whole operations from Intermittent to Repetitive. She would need to create an assembly line type of organization and still suffer from unused capacity because she would then be cutting out a large part of her companies products by no longer taking special request orders.
3. Elizabeth’s bakery is Intermittent involving the use of project processes, batch processes, or a combination of the
1. Elizabeth’s largest challenge considering her capacity needs, is that she outgrew her first facility’s capacity and then decided to move to a much larger facility where she realized she had considerably more capacity than needed for her business. Elizabeth is essentially paying for a facility she is not utilizing fully; therefore her sales expectations are not being met because of the bills she needs to pay with unused space. Elizabeth should have researched more into the facility layout before deciding to up and move her business to a new location. With considering this first, she could have accurately decided if the new building was the right fit for the arrangement of resources in the facility to enhance the producing process.
2. The proposal the business students at the university made for Elizabeth might not be the correct structure for her business due to the layout they are proposing involving a repetitive operation design. With a repetitive operation, the product variety is low, the degree of standardization is high, and the throughput time is shorter. These are all characteristics that would not fit the business for a bakery. Her operation is Intermittent. A bakery is labor-intensive, because of the specialized orders taken by customers that Elizabeth and her business takes pride in. The workers need to be able to perform different tasks, depending on the processes needed of the products being produced. The student’s just proposing the production of the McDoogle pie in large volumes, changes Elizabeth’s whole operations from Intermittent to Repetitive. She would need to create an assembly line type of organization and still suffer from unused capacity because she would then be cutting out a large part of her companies products by no longer taking special request orders.
3. Elizabeth’s bakery is Intermittent involving the use of project processes, batch processes, or a combination of the