Reference no: EM132457484

QUESTIONS:

Question 1. Tom Taylor, the sales manager, was told by his superior, Carl Bauer, to take an order from a new customer for a batch of products. Both Tom and Carl knew that the products ordered would only partially meet the customer's requirements. But Carl insisted that the order was too valuable to lose. What should Tom do?

Question 2. Nancy Bush, the plant manager, needs to decide whether to make or buy a compo-nent for the company's core product. She would like the advice of her production supervisors, since they must implement her decision. However, she fears that the supervisors will be biased toward making the component in-house, as they tend to favor retaining more work for their people. What should Nancy do?

Question 3. Student A, in order to graduate on February 4, works hard to finish her master of engineering report by the due date of January 8. She is planning to return to her home country immediately thereafter and get married. If she graduates on June 10, the next available graduation date, she will have to pay a tuition fee to keep her student status active for one more semester. That would be a substantial financial burden for her. Her advisor, Professor B, is hesitant to accept the report as presented. The report includes a major marketing activity designed by Student A to promote the new service package of a local company. Because of logistics, this major market-ing activity is scheduled to take place on January 20. No customer feedback data, which are required to demonstrate the value brought about by the report, are available before January 8. Professor B cannot bend the rules to pass the report without these data. Put your innovation hat on and recommend a way to resolve this conflict.

Question 4. The engineering manager of Company A proposes to install an automated bar-code scanner costing $4000. He estimates that he can save about 100 hours of labor time per month, as products can now be scanned much faster. He reasons that at the wage rate of $15 per hour, the benefit for using the automated bar-code scanner is $1500 per month, and the scanner can be paid back in 2.67 months. As the president of Company A, do you agree or disagree with the way he com-putes the cost-benefit ratio? Why or why not?

Question 5. The new millennium imposes a number of challenges on business managers, who are different from engineering managers and technology managers. Name a few such challenges.

Question 6. In the literature, it is generally said that innovations in the service sectors are lag-ging behind those in the manufacturing sectors. Explain why this might indeed be so.

Question 7. There have been a number of articles in the business literature proclaiming the potentially large contributions that data mining could make to the service sectors. Show an example in which the application of data mining had actually made a difference to a service company.