Operations Management dExam 1 Review
Which of the following smoothing constants would make an exponential smoothing forecast equivalent to a naive forecast?
1.0
John's House of Pancakes uses a weighted moving average method to forecast pancake sales. It assigns a weight of 5 to the previous month's demand, 3 to demand two months ago, and 1 to demand three months ago. If sales amounted to 1000 pancakes in May, 2200 pancakes in June, and 3000 pancakes in July, what should be the forecast for August?
2511
What is the forecast for May using a four-month moving average? Nov. 39 Dec. 36 Jan. 40 Feb 42 Mar 48 April 46
44
The Academic Computing Center has five trainers available in its computer labs to provide training sessions to students. Assume that the design capacity of the system is 1900 students per semester and that effective capacity equals 90% of design capacity. If the number of students who actually got their orientation session is 1500, what is the efficiency of the system?
87.7%
What is the 4.0 adoption?
AI and Automation
A Naive forecast for September sales of a product would be equal to:
Actual demand for August
What is a good way to measure level of innovation?
Average length of time to develop new products and services
What happened to California in 2006?
Because of fuel efficiency guidelines California raised gas prices, got behind and lost sales
What is a core competency that enables Walmart to compete on cost?
Bulk purchases
How does China maintain such a low currency valuation?
By dumping currency into the economy
What do the Latin/ cotton pants makers have as their core organizational competency?
Compete on time
What does Bobcat have as their core organizational competency?
Competes on time
What are the 5 competitive priorities?
Cost, time, flexibility, innovation, quality
An auto repair shop does state inspections for autos. The design capacity is 20 per hour and the effective capacity is 8 per hour. Yesterday they worked 10 hours and did 50 inspections. After calculating the utilization and efficiency for the day the manager__:
Determines that workers should have had side duties (stocking, etc.)
In the example I gave of the embroidery operation what was the symptom of the problem?
Employee utilization was low and labor costs were uncompetitive
During 2007-2008 SW Airlines utilized what very unusual strategy to increase profit?
Fuel hedging
A good core company to compete on cost?
Good relationship with outside contractors
What 2 words describe what must be used to utilized the "plant within a plant" method?
Group technology
Why did productivity go up in 2008-2009?
Housing Bubble and people that WEREN'T laid off had to come up with ways to make up for the missing labor and ended up making a more efficient process than before the crash.
What is the influence of product life style?
Introduction, growth, maturity, decline
Why did employment drop after ww2?
Many quantitative techniques were perfected in the war
Why do we (US) import so much Canadian Oil?
Our currency is higher in valuation than the Canadian dollar (we get a better deal)d
What happens when improvement is made to efficiency and productivity on assembly line processes that are not the bottleneck?
Some workers seem to be working slower
Consider a production line with five stations. Station 1 can produce a unit in 9 minutes. Station 2 can produce a unit in 10 minutes. Station 3 has two identical machines, each of which can process a unit in 12 minutes (each unit only needs to be processed on one of the two machines. Station 4 can produce a unit in 5 minutes. Station 5 can produce a unit in 8 minutes. Which station is the bottleneck station?
Station 2
What is the rule of thumb when comparing currencies?
Stronger currencies buy from weaker currencies. Which means weaker currencies export to stronger currencies.
Forecasts may be influenced by a product's position in its life cycle
True
True or False: Externally thinking people find it hard to see the flaw within themselves and tend to blame mistakes on other people/things
True
True or False: Walmart competes on all 5 competency priorities
True
What is a core organizational competency?
When a company focuses on prioritizing one of the 5 competitive priorities
Qualitative/Judgmental forecasting method
When there is no statistical data, just an expert opinion
Diseconomies of scale
Where the cost per unit rises as volume increases. Often caused by too many cooks in the kitchen
What would be a good core competency to compete on flexibility?
Workers that have many skills
Single Exponential Smoothing
a forecasting technique that uses a weighted average of past time-series values to forecast the value of the time series in the next period
What is the forecast error formula?
actual - forecast = error
Quantitative/Statistical forecasting method
based on the assumption that the future will be an extrapolation of the past
Group Technology
group parts by resources needed to manufacture into cells
Design Capacity
maximum output rate under ideal conditions
Theory of Constraints
principles that focus on increasing total process throughput by maximizing the utilization of all bottleneck work activities and workstations
Naive time series model
the forecast is equal to the actual value observed during the last period
Capacity Planning
the process of establishing the output rate that can be achieved by a facility
random variation (noise)
unexplained deviation of a time series from a predictable pattern
Plant within a Plant
when an existing facility is divided into more organizational parts to make the facility more productive
