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A manufacturer is designing a product layout for a new product production. It plans to use a production line for 8 hours per day in order to meet forecasted demand of 150 units per day. The product requires 7 tasks in total. These tasks are namely, A, B, C, D, E, F, and Grespectively. Task A does not have any predecessor to start. To start Task B, it requires Task A to be completed. Starting tasks C needs, the task B to be completed. Also, starting task D needed task Bto be completed. Task E can only start upon completion of Task C. Whereas starting task F needs the completion of both the tasks and E. Finally, starting task G needed, task F to be completed. The processing times for tasks. A.B.C. D. E. F. and

Gare 2.3.2.1.0.9.1.0, 1.2, 1.8, and 1.5 minutes respectively. Applying the most remaining tasks rule for balancing the assembly line, with ties broken according to longest task time first. What will be the idle time for the LAST Workstation?

a. None is the correct answer
b. 0.9
c. 1.4
d. 1.7
e. 0.2
 
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Case study

Mutual of America and corporate social responsibility

Mutual of America is one of a handful of mutual life insurance companies of scale still operating in the United States. Mutual of America was originally named the National Health and Welfare Retirement Association (NHWRA), and began business on 1 October 1945 offering retirement plans and insurance coverage.
NHWRA was unique in setting up a retirement system for not-for-profit health and welfare organizations. Such groups had been generally unable to obtain coverage from insurance carriers, at the time, due to the small numbers of people employed. Furthermore, their employees were not eligible to participate in Social Security, which excluded workers in most not-for-profit organizations. Thus an obvious need existed for a new type of retirement organization.
The Company was originally capitalized in 1945 with a loan from the Community Chest (now the United Way), and in 1984 became Mutual of America Life Insurance Company and soon was licensed to do business in all 50 states. At the end of 2005, Mutual of America’s assets totalled more than US$11bn dollars.
Mutual of America is known today as a company that offers products and services of the highest quality backed by the financial strength of a first-class organization. It is a direct writing company in that it does not employ independent or commission-based producers. All of its products are marketed and serviced by its own full-time salaried professional staff. Another important indication of its approach to mutual ethics is that the company does not sell any product that incorporates a surrender penalty. Unlike many of its competitors, Mutual of America encourages its customers to be direct users of its web-based systems instead of having to gain access to such facilities via the sales agent.
The company has a long history of community-based activities and charitable giving, and in 1996 established the Community Partnership Award (CPA). Underpinning the CPA is the desire to encourage not-for-profit organizations, such as charities and community support organizations, to become more professional in their approach and enjoy a greater degree of financial security. Now in its eleventh year, the CPA is firmly established as an annual national competition for not-for-profit organizations. The CPA scheme aims to encourage greater partnership between public, private and social sector organizations devoted to the public good. Such partnerships have addressed issues such as child abuse, teenage unemployment, homelessness, the mentally ill and a range of other social and community issues. The CPA’s mission:
recognizes outstanding non-profit organizations in the United States that have shown exemplary leadership by facilitating partnerships with public, private or social sector leaders who are working together as equal partners, not as donors and recipients, to build a cohesive community that serves as a model for collaborating with others for the greater good.

An example of this is the Boys’ and Girls’ Club of Hartford, Connecticut. The club was experiencing difficulties in raising funds and securing suitable facilities for its recreational activities. It identified a small plot of land that adjoined a local college (Trinity College), and successfully negotiated with the college’s Board of Directors for it to share the college’s own sports facilities. This allowed the club to offer a wide range of facilities to neighbourhood young people, with a minimal capital investment. In addition to the provision of sporting facilities, Trinity College students acted as both sporting and academic mentors to the young people who were members of the club. In addition to the club’s own sports, art and computer facilities, its young people have access to Trinity events and facilities: concerts and plays, playing fields, a swimming pool, library and technology rooms. From Monday through to Friday after 3 pm, and on Saturday mornings, Trinity students engage in work-study programmes, internships and volunteer activities at the club. Working alongside Boys’ and Girls’ Club staff, they help with homework, coach sports, teach art and computer skills, and run programmes in character development, leadership and life skills for the young people. In this way a vibrant community resource has been developed which has achieved real synergies for the various stakeholder groups involved.
The CPA has grown to the point where it receives several hundred applications each year for the competition. An independent assessment panel reduces this number to a shortlist, and these applications are subject to a more rigorous appraisal before the winners are finally chosen. An important aspect of the CPA is that considerable resources are devoted to promoting the ideas and best practices that are identified through the judging process. In this way, knowledge is shared and added to for the benefit of the wider not-for-profit sector in the United States.

 
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Case Study

Customer experience management at ResponseTek

By means of CEM, a company can incorporate the voice of its customers into its business strategies and operations. The aim is the development of trust and loyalty that will lead to the ultimate goal of advocacy. According to ResponseTek, it is not sufficient simply to monitor the impact of advocacy and satisfaction of one’s customers. Instead, it is necessary to take customer advocacy and satisfaction to a higher level of understanding by enabling a company to understand the root cause of customer satisfaction and advocacy. Once such root causes are identified, effective, well-focused actions can be implemented to increase satisfaction, advocacy and profitability. ResponseTek claims that its core suite is the only software platform that delivers a complete set of Customer Experience Management capabilities, comprising:

● Multi-channel experience collection

● Analysis

● Reporting

● Workflow management

● Closed-loop feedback.

The CEM methodology is based upon three core elements, namely:

1. Involve: capture the customer’s experience whenever and wherever it occurs. This means continuously gathering customer insights – whether customer, company or event-initiated – from any channel, such as the call-centre, web or in-store point of sale, when they want, and when their opinions are formed at the moment of delight or disappointment.

2. Integrate: integrate the customer’s voice into processes and employee activities. Staff, partners and executives need to be able to make informed decisions based on real-time customer-experience information. The right information needs to be filtered to the right person at the right time, from the executive level down to frontline employees. Users should be able to communicate improvements or comments back to the customer.

3. Improve: continuously turn customer experience insight into actionable improvements. The ability to facilitate enterprise-wide communication and change based on customer experience information is another critical aspect in achieving the greatest customer experience management benefits. Actionable, closed-loop communication capabilities enable companies to align business strategies with customer insights, and in the process create customer advocates.

Figure 17.3 shows how ResponseTek seeks to integrate all aspects of CEM into a unified conceptual framework described as the customer-driven enterprise.

Aon Reed Stenhouse (ARS) is one of a number of financial services organizations using ResponseTek’s system. ARS is the Canadian division of AON, a global provider of risk management and insurance broking services. Faced with increasing competition and limited understanding of its customers, ASR was looking for an efficient solution to improve retention, improve understanding of customers and, through that better understanding, improve the customer experience, this allowing ASR to set itself aside from the competition. ResponseTek implemented a system of ASR which provided regular monitoring of real-time customer experiences, a ‘dashboard’ system to provide senior management with daily summaries of the customer experience by segment and by region, and an early warning system for ‘at risk’ customers (potential defectors) on a daily basis.
David Cliche, marketing manager for ASR summarized the benefits of implementing CEM:

We had to respond to the changing competitive landscape of the Insurance industry and look for alternative ways to make better informed business decisions. ResponseTek helped us to accomplish this by integrating the voice of the customer into our business processes … We now know a lot more about

our customers than we did before. Rather than one touchpoint, we are now able to understand our interactions with customers throughout their lifecycle. Knowing what our customers want and the complementary products and services they need is invaluable information.

 
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Case Study

Satisfaction surveys at Nationwide Building Society

Nationwide Building Society has been conducting an employee opinion survey called ViewPoint since 1993. The catalyst for its introduction was the merger of Nationwide and Anglia Building Societies – two organizations with different cultures, processes and business systems. A number of years after this merger had taken place, an increasing unease and uncertainty amongst employees about its success was perceived. In addition, the UK PFS business climate was becoming increasingly competitive, with deregulation allowing banks and insurance companies to compete with building societies for mortgage and savings business, leading to further uncertainty.
The objective was (and still is) to give employees a platform from which they can have their say about various aspects of their work, working environment and the manner in which they are led, managed and developed. In summary, where they think Nationwide is doing well and what they believe the Society could do better. Asking for opinions, however, is one thing but it is vital that in addition to listening, companies act (and are seen to be acting) on the issues raised in the survey. Failure to do so will lead to cynicism and apathy towards the surveying process.
Nationwide’s ViewPoint survey is conducted annually in April by ORC International, an external consultancy. Using ORCI enables Nationwide to remain impartial and the data confidential. The survey was paper-based until 2004, when it was made available via the Society’s intranet with a paper-based option retained. Time is allocated during the working day for completion.

The survey comprises three parts:

1. Employee demographics, including job type, location, age, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, etc.

2. A variety of work-based questions (104 in all) based on a five-point Likert scale

3. A small number of open questions about working at Nationwide, with a free-form response box to allow comments to be made by employees.

In 2005, 91 per cent of employees (approx 14 000) completed the survey.

The 104 work-based questions are grouped into a number of different themes or indices, including employee satisfaction, pay and benefits, leadership and group image, training and development, and employee and customer commitment.
The results are collated by ORCI and reports are produced at Group, divisional, departmental and team levels for distribution to managers across the business. To retain anonymity and confidentiality, no reports are issued with less than six responses. The reports include peer and external benchmarking data, and a comparison to the previous year’s results.
On receipt of the reports, local managers will normally organize team meetings to disseminate the results and form action plans to look into poor scoring themes or themes showing a decline in results.
At a company level, the results are made available through different media, including an intranet site and an in-house magazine. Some of the 2005 results were as follows.

Using ORCI enables external benchmarking on a number of questions with other financial services providers and other industries. Generally, Nationwide benchmarks very favourably. When compared with other financial services organizations, out of the 41 benchmarked questions Nationwide came top – 11 question scores were the highest, 13 were second, and six were third.
The survey itself has changed very little over the last 3 years, and there are a large number of questions that have been there from the beginning. This gives the survey great power as over time trends can be established in the data that allow progress or regression to be seen. Similarly, it enables the impact of certain initiatives to be seen.
Nationwide take the results of the survey one step further than most and links the data to their customer and business performance data. This research (Project Genome) has led to the model shown in Figure 16.1.
The links between committed employees, committed customers and better business performance have been established. The data for satisfaction with pay, coaching, values and committed people all come from ViewPoint.
Through the model we can say that a 3 per cent shift in employees ‘values’ results in customer commitment increasing by 1 per cent, bringing in an increased net present value of £6.5 million in mortgage sales. The model allows line-of-sight from employee behaviours through customer behaviours to the bottom line. Consequently, the employee opinion survey can be used as an early warning system to future business performance.

It is valuable to exercise a degree of caution regarding employee opinion surveys as they measure employee’s perceptions. These perceptions may be well-rooted or transient, and may depend on what side of the bed the employee got out of that morning. The timing of the survey is also very important, as conducting one during a redundancy period, for example, is highly likely to skew results. One other point to consider is the ‘say–do’ paradox. Employees will not necessarily take the course of action they say they will in the survey. A high response rate and data over time will overcome most of these potential problem areas.
problem areas. To have been named as the Sunday Times ‘Best Big Company to Work For’ in 2005, voted for by employees, is a pretty good indication that Nationwide has come a long way since the unease of the early 1990s. Listening to and acting on employees’ feedback has been critical to that success.

 
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