Project Management and Inventory Management Are Defined

¶ … project management and inventory management are defined through real life examples and the affects of the management practices on the performance of the business is discussed.

Question No.

In order to design a grocery delivery business, there are several competencies that are required to be mastered to gain an edge over the competitors. The business must have a unique strategy which is based on a distinctive capability which provides the company edge over the other substitutes. An alliance with the two major food stores will play a strategic role in the way that operations would take place. However the distinctive capability for the business would be internal. The core processes would be designed in such a way that provides reliable, quick and efficient service. The support processes will include the procurement processes that would support the quality assurance department.

The project will follow multiple critical paths. The multiple critical paths will ease the workload of the processes and help in attaining shorter delivery time by the help of effective use of multi-tasking and simultaneous work will mean lesser constraints and the removal of bottlenecks in the processes. However the use of more than one critical path would mean the increase in the risks associated with the project. The risks would increase as the dependencies of various paths would be linked to each other and failure in any of the paths would mean a hindrance in the whole process which would increase the risk of failure of the project. However with proper risk assessment the risk factors can be managed.

The responsibilities of the project manager would be divided. The responsibilities would be delegated and a decentralized system will allow the person close to the processes to make decisions on the basis of his own knowledge by giving them the authority and responsibility of completing tasks. The resource dependencies will also increase and the total available slack would decrease as there would be more than one critical path hence decreasing the need for total available slack.

Question No. 2:Start (Call Received)

Answer Phone

Who is calling?

Customer Other

SupplierName/Greeting

Reason for call

Follow up call

Take Order

New dealFlowchart of Movie Theater

Proper Closing

Proper Closing

Payment Details

Order details

The above flowchart describes the step-by-step process of a movie theater's call attending procedures. As the above flowchart shows that there are not many steps that can be avoided or eliminated however there is still room for improvement. The operation managers can design this process in such an automated way that the calls would be transferred automatically to separate operators who are dealing separately with suppliers and customers. This will help in eliminating the initial few steps and will ease the whole process.

Question No. 3:

Inventory can be defined as the total number of stocks which is held by a company or a business. Inventory is an asset for the company. There are two ways in which inventory can be managed efficiently Just in Time Inventory and Economic Order Quantity. Both of the models are established to increase productivity and reduce costs. It depends upon the nature of the business for which one of the two models are to be used.

Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) aims to maintain a level of inventory at the absolute minimum cost by ordering the amount of materials only one time which minimizes the annual inventory costs and ordering costs. The level of inventory has to be closely monitored and a fixed number of units is decided, when that number is reached another order of the same quantity is made, that level is the reorder level. For products that have continuous demand, Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) could be extremely beneficial. There are certain assumptions on which Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) Model is established. The first assumption is that ordering costs and the demand for the product will remain constant. The second assumption is that the inventory will be used up at a fixed rate and a fixed number of units will be sufficient to replace the used up inventory. If these assumptions prove to be correct for an organization then the Economic Order Quantity Model would minimize the overall holding costs and there would be no shortages.

Just-in-Time (JIT) is a model of inventory management which was invented by the Japanese; it focuses on the timely delivery of the stock to its customers at the right level of quantity and quality. The aim of Just-in-Time (JIT) is to reduce the level of inventory and at the same time make as much as profits that they can without any inventory constraints. Just-in-Time (JIT) was developed for companies to meet the expectations of the customers' demands by maintaining a minimum level of inventory and providing the customers timely quality products/services.

Question No.4:

There are a number of factors which causes the management practices to differ from one form of business to the other form of business. The business structure has a lot to do with the management practices. The industry and the competitors of a business also play a great role in shaping up the management practices. The management practices of the service companies differ from the manufacturing companies in many ways.

Service companies deal with intangible goods while the manufacturing companies deal with the tangible goods, therefore the management practices are more service oriented to facilitate the customers/stakeholders because of the nature of the business conducted. The customer contacts in service companies need to be managed far more carefully then they are to be managed in the manufacturing companies.