Reference no: EM133487463

Assignment:

In this assignment, you'll need to develop the thought process behind the specific factor issues. I want you to consider yourself in front of managers explaining why a specific factor was chosen as an evaluator for location.

In this example, the book has actually defined those 7 factors for you already, but normally you'd be looking at these factors for a new plant. For instance, we are looking at a business that provides home cleaning services (not many customers come to the office but the location is important for staffing purposes). What you should be doing is approaching the question and explaining to your manager what the 7 factors are and what makes them uniquely important versus other factors.

You should be discussing the qualitative and quantitative elements. Visitor market topics: regulatory issues, development programs by the cities, competition as a positive factor, spending habits of the visitors - recreational vs. business, and actual spending values (how much will they spend). You should be doing this for all of the other 6 factors - overall demographics, transportation, restaurants/nightclubs, low political risk, real estate market, and comparable market analysis.

Remember you are making a presentation to your management, so assume they have ZERO ideas about anything related to these cities or why each of these factors was chosen (even though the book gave you the 7) so it is up to you to spoon feed them a simple and concise description of why these are issues to be reviewed along with your recommendation as to the overall weight of each (20% for visitor market, 10% for low political risk, etc....).

Working with your cleaning company will give you the greatest insights into location strategies or layout strategies or supply chain issues or quality issues or the other principles that you can work through.

You should be building a story around those OM Principles. However, don't research to the degree that you are looking at annual reports to get hard data on the demographics or your customer base or the quality metrics for a new product. Instead, the data that you should be collecting is logical data that has some real context around it.

Take a look at the Hints and Suggestions for and you'll see some examples of what I mean by the depth of answer you should develop.

For instance, Good and Services - I mention that I am not interested in the details of the product. I am interested in the process of gathering data. I don't expect you to tell me that you collected actual hard data from the R&D team by interviewing real people and it will cost $1.5M to develop the product and the ROI is 9 months. Just tell me that "we spoke with stakeholders in finance and R&D to develop a budget for the next generation product. R&D developed a budget that was validated by finance based on previous similar projects. The timeline for the R&D team to complete the project and release to the market is 19 months." That's the kind of detail I need. This just proves to me that you understand the kind of data you'd need to collect from R&D and finance.