Developing Good Business Sense

You are the operations managers of a company planning to open a chain of large computer stores in major cities. You plan to offer small businesses a range of hardware, including servers, PCs, and cell phones, and software applications that work on both the Windows and Linux platforms. Your business model is to offer small businesses "one stop shopping." Your designers, salespeople, installers, and service and maintenance employees will be expected to provide a solution that matches each customer's specific needs. You are meeting to decide how to design your operations and materials management processes to provide the best quality solutions at the lowest possible cost.

Analyze the problems, issues, and tasks employees' will have to solve to best provide such a service to customers.

It will be important to ensure that the company has a reliable supply of high quality, low-cost inputs because the types of products we will sell are only as reliable as the components used to make them.

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To ensure quality, employees will need to design products that are easy to assemble, identify customer needs, improve operating methods by getting functional departments to cooperate, and welcome suggestions from lower-level employees about how to improve the quality of the company's products.

It is not only important to increase the quality of products, but also to become more efficient at the same time and continually search for ways to improve the making and selling of goods and services. The company must decide which type of production layouts will help increase productivity and according to Jones (2007), "A major distribution decision companies have to make is whether to distribute their products themselves or outsource the task to other companies".

Based on this analysis, what kind of work methods and procedures will be needed to achieve your goals? In...