Reference no: EM132836347

Question - EMI Fabrication is a manufacturing company in rural Texas that offers its workers a rotating four-day work week with ten-hour shifts; it is located several miles from the nearest restaurants in town. As a result, most of the workers purchase one of two types of meal plans at the company's two on-site bistros. The "Gold Plan" entitles a worker to eat three meals a day, four days a week. The "Silver Plan'' plan entitles employees to eat any 40 meals during a given month. Of course, workers can always purchase any given meal for cash. Because management is anxious to attract and retain new employees, it allows them to change their meal plans from month to month. In fact, this is a common event, as workers pick plans that best serve their needs each month. But this flexibility has also created a nightmare at lunch times, when large numbers of employees attempt to eat at the same time.

In response to repeated complaints about the long lines that form at lunchtime, the company's Chief Financial Officer decides to look into the matter and see for herself what is going on. At lunch the next day, she observes that each cashier at the entrance to the bistros requires each patron to present an employee ID card, checks their picture, and then consults a long, hard-copy list of workers to determine whether or not they are eligible for the current meal. A cashier later informs her that these tasks have become necessary because many workers attempt to eat meals that their plans do not allow.

The cashier also emphasizes that the current system provides no way of keeping a worker from eating two of the same meals at the two different dining facilities, and the cashier says that this problem is surprisingly common. The CFO realizes that one solution to the long-lines problem is to simply hire more cashiers. She also recognizes that a computerized system might be an even more cost-effective solution. In particular, she realizes that if the current cashiers had some way of identifying each worker quickly, the computer system could immediately identify a given worker as eligible, or ineligible, for any given meal.

1. What are two or more ''technology solutions'' for this problem?

2. What hardware would be required for each solution you named in part 1?

3. What software would be required for each solution you named in part 1? What would this software do?

4. How would you go about showing that your solutions would be more cost-effective than simply hiring more cashiers?