Dated: 21st February’ 19

Operations & Production Management - 2138 Submitted By: Yusra Syed (07360)

Kristen’s Cookie Company Case – Assignment

Q1: Kristen’s Cookie Company: Promise to Deliver in One Hour

The case ‘Kristen’s Cookie Company’ is about a student who plans to launch a business in his/her on-
campus apartment with the help of his/her roommate. The business centres around the idea of selling
mouth-watering, straight from the oven yet fresh cookies to students as a solution to their hunger pangs
that may annoy them late at night while studying. Further, the idea factors around the essence that the
cookies, since they will be fresh, will be prepared only when the order arrives as per the specifications
of the buyer and will be ready for delivery within an hour. However, when we further analyse the
promise of delivering cookies within one hour, we realize that if in case the business receives 5 orders
at a point in time, the 5th order will fail to be delivered within an hour as it is likely to take 7 more
minutes to be processed based on the throughput time of 27 minutes and the subsequent orders are likely
to be completed within the cycle time of 10 minutes.

Kristen should take orders on a first come first served basis. Her promise of 60-minute delivery when
she has only 1 oven and can only produce 4 dozen cookies in the first hour and 6 dozen in each
subsequent hour (without a capacity cushion), is an unreasonable promise that she may be unable to
keep on a consistent basis. For example, if orders for more than 4 dozen cookies came in within the first
10 minutes, Kristen would be unable to fulfil this promise, and the shift would only decline in her ability
to keep that promise as it progressed through the evening. Even with two workers, the constraint of 1
oven dictates a potential problem in making/keeping a 60-minute delivery promise. Kristen should not
make this promise to her customers.

Q2: Scenario Analysis: Different Flavoured Cookies

Evaluating this case from the perspective if the ingredients are different for each dozen (different
flavoured cookies), they cannot be prepared at once hence, mixing will be done three times. The
capacity of the electric mixer will then be 10 dozen/hour instead of 30 whereas the capacity for Kristen
will be 7.5 dozen/hour instead of 15 which may had been the case if the 3 successive dozen had the
same ingredients. The cycle time in this case will be 8 minutes however in contrast to 10 minutes earlier.
The bottleneck in this case will still be the oven with the capacity of about 6 dozen/hour.