Scenario

Company XYZ is a manufacturing company that has being operating on the Industrial Belt in Kingston Jamaica for 25 years. Since the start of their operation, the company’s daily activities have been extremely manual. For the past two years the company has seen a significant drop in revenues and they are unable to track their creditors, and reconcile their accounts receivables and payables. Also, Paul who is the head of the Production Team regularly orders raw materials even when the company has sufficient in its warehouse. He is also unable to tell if their new product that was just released on the market is doing well and in which region it has received its lowest sale. Due to this, Michelle, his manager has labeled him as a poor decision maker, inefficient and unproductive. Michelle now complains that it is very difficult to rely on Paul’s assessments of the Production activities and due to this she is unable think of competitive strategies, properly run the department and think of ways to stay competitive in an already competitive market. In the company’s regularly quarterly report to the Board, Michelle stated that Paul’s actions are causing the company millions in loses and if the financial wounds aren’t cauterized quickly, the company will become a figment of Jamaicans imagination in 2023. The chairman of the board then tasked Michelle to come up with a solution in three weeks to make the company remains viable as they are thinking expanding to the Caribbean in the next five years. Michelle then hired you as a consultant to help the company become automated and modern.

1. Examine the characteristics and limitation of these recommended systems

2. Examine how XYZ can prevent information bias when these systems are implemented

3. Advise XYZ of how to better manage their suppliers of raw materials using technology

4. Examine how XYZ departments can benefit from collaboration and why it is important. Justify your answer

This case focuses on developing a deeper understanding of the personnel scheduling problem.

Big Town Fire Department would like to schedule their human resource requirements in fire and safety operations, aka, firefighters. The town runs two schedules per day, 12 hours each. Firefighters are compensated hourly at $30 per hour plus 33% for benefits. Firefighters who work the night shift received $5 more per hour and have a commensurate increase in benefits.

The weekly firefighter personnel requirements are:

The normal shift for a firefighter is 4 days 12 hours a day followed by 3 consecutive days off, working on either the day or the night shift (not both). Big Town managers would like to schedule the firefighters in the least cost way, but must make sure the requirements are met.

Questions to Address

a.How does the benchmark optimal solution change if there are part-time employees that are added who work two consecutive days with 5 days off either day or night but not both day and night?

b.Provide a table with different solutions for upper limits of 0%, 20%, 40%, etc., of part time firefighters as defined in part a. For example, assume that at most the total number of firefighters who are part time is 20% of the total number and so on.

If possible, please provide excel