Reference no: EM132938645

There is a medium-sized enterprise, agriculture vehicles, in India. The company has 200 personals in 8 units, including quality control, financial management, production planning and logistic, maintenance and repair, production, research and development, marketing and sales and human resource management. Table 1 demonstrates the number of personnel in each unit: Table1. details of the company's amount of personnel Sector Name Number of Personnel Quality Control 10 Financial management 15 Production Planning & Logistic 10 Maintenance and repair 10 Production 85 Research & Development 20 Marketing & sale 35 Human Resource Management 15 The main strategy of the company is cost leadership. The company 2018 total cost was about 24,000,000$. The company has lost its market share for two consecutive years, and the CEO decided for a 30% decrease in the total cost. Accordingly, each unit is asked for a 30% decrease in its costs. Table 2 indicates the detailed cost of the company in the year 2018, each unit human resource costs and other costs. Table2. deatils of the companie's cost Units Human resource costs Other costs Total costs Quality control 610,000 390,000 1,000,000 Financial Management 790,000 210,000 1,000,000 Production Planning & Logistics 610,000 390,000 1,000,000 Maintenance & Repair 610,000 1,390,000 2,000,000 Production 3,900,000 6,100,000 10,000,000 Research & Development 1,650,000 2,350,000 4,000,000 Marketing and Sales 2,150,000 850,000 3,000,000 Human resource management 790,000 1,210,000 2,000,000 Total costs 11,140,000 12,860,000 24,000,000 Today, there is a meeting between all eight units' mangers with companies' CEOs for expressing the challenges of each unit, finding potential ways of decreasing costs and finally making decisions. Here is a summary of each unit challenges: Quality control The quality control section has ten personnel, including one manager and nine industrial engineers. One of the very hardworking engineers passed away in the way of coming to work on the last day of his career. All the personnel are upset because of this happening, and they know that he was struggling with financial problems. As he died just in his last working day, and he could not complete his employment period by missing just one day. His family are not eligible to ask for his retirement benefit. The quality control unit should pay his retirement benefit to his family ethically while they are not officially obliged to do so. On the one hand the department has to decrease its costs, and the manager is thinking of 3 personnel lay off to decrease its costs. in the other hand, the manager is ethically to pay for the retirement benefit of his dead hardworking employee, to motivate other personnel and to show them they are worthy for the company. Each personnel lay off in the quality control section can lead to a 60000 $ cost-saving while paying for a retirement benefit costs 70000 $. What should the manager do in this situation? Also explain what is their plan for 30% cut in their costs? Financial management: As the sale has been decreased by 20%, financial management is hardly covering the totals costs. On the other hand, the HR department estimated that each employee performance is equal to 5 hours a day in the financial management unit, and four newcomer interns do most of the works. There are one manger, two supervisor and eight other staff in this unit too. One of the supervisor and 5 of the staff have 63 years old and are about to be retired. Table 3 demonstrates the annual payment to the personnel of the financial management department and the required amount for retirement benefits. What program do you propose for a 30% decrease in the costs of this unit? ( you should not fire anyone). Table 3. the annual payment to the personnel and the required amount for retirement benefits position To be Paid Money Financial manager 70000$ Financial supervisor 60000$ employees 50000$ The average required payment for the retirement benefit 70000$ Production planning and logistics: Production planning and the logistic department is mainly in charge of coordinating input and output follow and production with the main companies' strategies. This unit has ten personnel. 3 personnel asked for a maternity leave at the same time. Numerous tasks must be done in this unit, and the manager is thinking of hiring new personnel. As the CEO asked for a 30% decrease in all units, he knows that he cannot hire new employees. He categorized undertaken tasks in the units to 3 and calculated number of personnel he needs as below: Table4. task types and required personnel for production planning and logistics unit Type Duty Type Number of required personnel The payment amount for an individual A Managerial and specialized 1 70000$ B Specialized tasks in technical level 5 60000$ C General tasks that do not require specialized skills 3 45000$ What do you advise the manager of this unit in this situation? Maintenance and repair: One of the finishing machines is damaged. For repairing the machine, needs to bring a technician from Japan to repair the machine, which takes at least 1-month. The repair and maintenance section has eight engineers and two supervisors. The CEO thinks that's kind of wasting money because most of the time, there is no work for this section to do. And always when they need technician they can outsource it.. He says: if the existent workforces are not talented enough to solve the issues why they are recruited? If there is no need for them, why they are still here? The manager of repair and Maintenance section says that all these staff were recruited 20 years ago, and they are all passing their last decades of being at work while they never have been sent to any specialized training. There were good candidatesto be hired 20 years before, but the company did not invest on them for training and now it is not fair to fire them. Sending them to some training workshops can solve the issue. But manager says why I should invest on training workforces that are going to be retired within the ten years and again recruit new workforces? The maintenance and repair manager says that these staffs have implicit knowledge and can be beneficial for the company if they receive some training. On the other hand, if we recruit a new engineer, it might take two years for them to replace the experienced ones. The managers asked for the detailed costs of training, layoff and recruitment costs. Table 5 indicates the human resource costs detail in maintenance and repair unit, and table 6 indicates the age and working experience years of this units' personnel: Table 5. Detailed costs of the human resource department Maintenance and Repair management annual salary 70000$ Engineer salary 60000$ Workshop costs for an individual 10000$ Retirement benefit 70000$ Recruitment, selection and training cost for an individual 3000$ Layoff costs for an individual 15000$ Table 6. the age and working experience years of the personnel in the maintenance and repair unit Number of personnel age Working experience in the company 2 63 27 4 40 15 3 50 20 1 (the manager) 60 25 What should they do in this situation? Production: There are 85 employees in the production unit, including one production manager, four engineers and 80 operators who mainly work with machines. There are some bottlenecks in the production lines, which caused delays in the production line and miss achievement in targeted goals that increased the production to 30%. The production engineers believe that this is happening because of the variation in operators' performance. Some operators work fast and some work slow, because they are paid based on their working hours, not the number of pieces. The production manager does not accept this idea and thinks that the difference in the operation period in different stations is the cause of bottlenecks. Table 7 indicates the minimum time required for operation by an operator in each station in production line A, the real-time consumed for operation in each station and the number of workers in each station who do the same work. Table 7. details of production time in line A Stations 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Total Real consumed time in each station 60 180 100 60 180 90 85 90 Standard required time for an operation in each statement with one operator 60 120 100 120 120 90 60 80 Number of operators in each station 1 2 2 2 2 1 1 2 Bottlenecks A B What is the problem? The operator's performance or production line design caused a bottleneck? What should be done for decreasing bottlenecks and reaching to a production target? Research and Development: The research and development unit has recruited two new well-educated researchers that are In charge of working on a new generation of torsion bars. These two newcomers had train for two month to joining the team for developing the project. After three months of work, both researchers came to the manager and asked for a voluntary leave! If they leave, it will be tough for the company to replace new researchers and a significant financial loss will be imposed to the company because of both: training new researchers and the waste of money and time on those who want to leave and creation of a gap in the research project duration. The manager asked them for their reason, and they say that they are not happy with their working conditions . They complain about the company's performance management system. They say: our performance is measured based on our two weeks' output, while in the field of research and development, there could be months of researching without any meaningful result. There is too much control over us, while we need more freedom to be able to have better performance and accepting more responsibility. We are treated like an employee who is just expected to do predefined works while we are creators and developers. We cannot tolerate this situation. What caused the voluntary leave of the two new employees? Is there any way for the company to keep them? What should a company do to prevent such an incident happening again? Marketing and sale: The sale statistics indicate that the amount of the yearly sale has decreased by 20% And 4 of the wellexperienced marketing and sale staffs left the company because of the uncertain future of the company. There is a massive variation in the number of monthly sales between sales personnel. Six new employees have been hired in the sales department that has sales experience but not in this industry. For increasing the sale, new marketing campaigns should be designed, and the salesperson should travel to other cities. The personnel are not motivated because of the compensation plan. The manager is thinking about proposing a new compensation plan that motivates sales while decreasing the costs. Table 8 indicates the positions and the considered payment for each position in the marketing and sale department as below: Position Salary Sale management 70000$ Marketing deputy 55000$ Sale deputy 500005% commission Sale expert 400005% commission Marketing expert 45000 What kind of payment do you propose to increase the sale while controlling the costs? Human resource management The HR departments consist of 15 personals. the manager is male, and all the other 14 personnel are female. In the last three years, averagely 4 of the personnel went to the maternity leave in a year. The manager is dissatisfied with the situation because particularly in this situation he requires his personnel to work effectively and help the other units with their human resource issues but, 4 out of 14 personnel are in maternity leave, and the situation will be worse as he has to fire 3 of his personnel to decrease the unit costs. Because of considering job discrimination issues, the manager cannot state this issue openly. What do you advise the manager to do?

What is the Marketing and sale issue and what is the solutions?