You are required to select a current article from the Wall Street Journal or the business section of a major daily newspaper such as The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Los Angeles Times or from one of the following business periodicals such as Business Week, Fortune, Forbes, The Economist or Harvard Business Review
Once an article has been chosen, write a 500 word summary of the article in your own words. After the summary has been developed, describe how the article relates to the material we have covered
Part 1
1. Understand the concept of capacity and how important it is to "manage" capacity.
2. Explain the impact of economies of scale on the capacity of a firm.
3. Understand how to use decision trees to analyze alternatives when faced with the problem of adding capacity.
4. Describe the differences in planning capacity between manufacturing firms and service firms.
Part 2
1. Explain what project management is and why it is important.
2. Identify the different ways projects can be structured.
3. Describe how projects are organized into major subprojects.
4. Understand the concept of earned value management (EVM).
5. Determine the "critical path" for a project.
6. Show how activity time uncertainty can be analyzed in projects.
7. Demonstrate how to "crash," or reduce the length of, a project.
Part 3
1. Understand what a production process is.
2. Understand the idea of production process mapping.
3. Define Little's law.
4. Demonstrate how production processes are organized.
5. Describe the product-process matrix.
6. Provide an overview of how the different types of production processes are designed.
7. Understand how to design and analyze an assembly line.
Part 4
1. Describe the characteristics of service processes and how they differ from manufacturing processes.
2. Classify service processes.
3. Explain service blueprinting.
4. Understand waiting line (queuing) analysis.
5. Model some common waiting line situations and estimate server utilization, the length of a waiting line, and average customer wait time.