1.

INPUT-PROCESS-OUTPUT(IPO) MODEL
The input-process-output (IPO) model is a functional graph that identifies
the inputs, outputs and the required processing tasks required to transform
inputs into output.

IPO model of Industry system

INPUTS PROCESSES OUTPUTS

PPPPROCES
Capital Printing Components
Energy Refining Product
Labor Transporting Profit
Land Packaging

Warehouse Assembling

Knowledge

Component

2. Operation priorities and trade-offs/core competence of an

organization

TOYOTA

Toyota Motor Corporation is a Japanese multinational automotive

manufacturer headquartered in Toyota, Aichi, Japan. It is the largest
automobile manufacture in Japan, and the second- largest in the world
behind Volkswagen. The company focuses on mass production of vehicles
that are affordable to the low-end customers. It was the world’s first
 automobile manufacturer to produce more than 10 million vehicles per year-
a record that it announced in 2012 and 2013.

Operational Priorities:-

Toyota as a top manufacturer and producer in the automobile industry. It uses a set
of operation strategies to achieve its goals and objectives. For starters, Toyota
makes its management decisions using the long-term philosophy, sometimes at the
expense of the short-term targets. The company promotes the culture of avoiding
fixing issues in an effort to maximize the quality of production from the start while
standardizing its tasks to guarantee employee empowerment and continuous
improvement. Toyota uses a visual control to make sure that no problems remain
hidden. It has also adopted the use of highly reliable and tested technologies that
help it to serve both its processes and people. It also strives to grow leaders who
understand how it works, run their errands in line with the company’s philosophy,
and/or teach it to the other junior employees. Through this approach, the enterprise
develops exceptional teams and people who understand and follow its philosophy.

Core competencies:-

The core competence of Toyota Motor Corporation is its capacity to create

vehicles of incredible quality, best case scenario costs, along these lines giving
an incentive to cash to the clients. This core competence of value can be credited
to its imaginative creation rehearses. The quality part of Toyota's items have
changed the vehicles in the past and all the car organizations needed to attempt and
better the nature of their items. Toyota produces vehicles in five brands, which
give it more room to shift towards the model with high demand. They are
dedicated to manufacturing quality vehicles that help it fetch high sales year after
year. With this tactical strategy, Toyota finds it easy to command a significant
market share. Delivery is considered a competitive priority because buyers focus
on satisfying their wants and needs at the right time and in the right quantity.
Toyota is a master of timely deliverance of products, a strategy that enables to lead
in production and sales of vehicles. For example, it became the first company in
the world to have produced over 10 million vehicles in a single year between 2012
and 2013.

3. Hazel Case
1. In what ways are Hazel’s customers most likely to judge the quality of her lawn
care services?

Basically, Hazel's lawn services can be judged through appearance. Her

customers can decide satisfaction by simply observing the area in which Hazel
did some service whether she succeeded in eradicating those unsightly and tall
grasses leaving the yard to have a more pleasing scenery than before. It can
also be judged if the instructions being specified were met by Hazel. In
addition, Hazel’s credibility and insights from other customer will also be
considered by the customers.

2. Hazel is the operations manager of her business. Among her responsibilities are
forecasting, inventory management, scheduling, quality assurance, and
maintenance.

a. What kinds of things would likely require forecasts?

Hazel should be able to forecast the weather in performing the services. It is

not good to do some mowing when the weather is not good particularly if it's
raining or there’s a storm. Furthermore, Hazel should also determine the
demand for her lawn care services such as the average number of requests she
gets daily. This way, she can properly schedule work and maintain the
necessary equipment. It is also advantageous to Hazel if she can forecast how
many weeks before the grasses will grow longer to the point in which her
regular customers will need her again to take care for their respective lawns.

b. What inventory items does Hazel probably have? Name one inventory
decision she has to make periodically.
Usually, when someone engages to lawn care business, the items that will
most probably be needed include lawn mowers, fertilizers, seeds, grass
cutters, and other gardening tools such as rake, weeders, hedge shears,
shovel, and many others. Of all these inventory items, the most important
would be the lawn mower and she has to keep its maintenance periodically
in order for it to last longer and ensuring that it's on the best condition since
it brings a material impact for her business. Aside from its usage, the lawn
mower is technically an equipment with machine that needs maintenance.
c. What scheduling must she do? What things might occur to disrupt
schedules and cause Hazel to reschedule?
Hazel may schedule the time when to perform service and how many hours
will it take to complete. It is highly important because it would ensure
smooth operations for her business and keep the customer well-informed,
thus, gives more probability of their satisfaction. The duration of service is
also an important thing to schedule because it would determine the
appropriate compensation and the number of clients she can handle in a
given period of time. In relation to forecasting, factors such as weather and
customer demand as well as malfunctioning of the machines and availability
of her workers affect the scheduling of Hazel's services. Moreover, lawn
area, lawn condition, and the number of services of a requested by a given
customer can also affect Hazel’s scheduling.

d. How important is quality assurance to Hazel’s business? Explain.

Simply stated, quality assurance is assuring quality. Quality assurance is
assuring that tasks, procedures and processes are executed exactly as
intended every time. Like most establishments, quality assurance is indeed
highly important for Hazel’s lawn care business since it would help her to
clearly identify weaknesses and inconsistencies in her business and enable
her to design techniques on how to remedy or prevent them. As mentioned,
it would ensure smooth operations and help increase customer demands,
thus, it would mean more profit. Quality assurance also reflects on her
business credibility or reputation.

e. What kinds of maintenance must be performed?

Even if Hazel is starting a small business, there are still a need for some
maintenance specifically on service quality, inventory management and
contact with the customers. On service quality, Hazel should be able to
maintain the quality of her work on all of her customers which can be judged
based on indicators given on the first question. Of course, maintenance of
her inventory items and equipment are critically a need. She should maintain
and check that the condition of her lawn mower/s and gardening tools are in
 best condition. In addition, the checking of expiration dates for her fertilizers
should also be consistent. When it comes to customer contact, Hazel should
maintain good communication with her customer in order to be updated and
effectively deal with any changes. Like for example, if a customer decides to
cancel his/her requests or reschedule it for some other time because of some
reasons, Hazel can then take proper measures on these occurrences.
Therefore, it would help maintain healthy client relationship and contribute
to a smooth flow of operations.

3. What are some of the trade-offs that Hazel probably considered relative to:

a. Working for a company instead of for herself?

Trade off between the money and freedom gained through ownership of her
business. The time of searching for a job.

b. Expanding the business

Trade off between profit and cost off expansion. She could make higher profits
but it require more investment.

c. Launching a website?

Trade off between cost of launching the website and increased number of
customers.

4. The town is considering an ordinance that would prohibit putting grass

clippings at the earth for pickup because local landfills cannot handle the
volume. What options might Hazel consider if the ordinance is passed? Name
two advantages and two drawbacks of each option.
Hazel can have two options. She could clear all the grass clippings at the
curb and expand her business. She could use the plucked grass clippings as
other sources of revenue such as selling as a livestock feed.
Advantages
 • She can expand their service by collecting the grass clippings and throw
away.
• The business can be also expanded since they don’t want to wait for the
customers to grow the grass clippings.
Disadvantages
• Extra service require hiring more employees which need additional cost.
• She may be also need to reschedule the hours since the increase in the
working hours.

5. Hazel decided to offer the students who worked for her a bonus of $25 for ideas
on how to improve business, and they provided several good ideas. One idea
that she initially rejected now appears to hold great promise. The student who
proposed the idea left and is currently working for a competitor. Should Hazel
send that student a check for the idea? What are the possible trade-offs?

Most probably the idea that the student suggested to Hazel would also have
been suggested to the competitor. Anyway, Hazel can send that student a check
for the idea. Possible trade-off is gaining competitors and losing an innovator.

6. All managers have to cope with variation.

a. What are the major sources of variation that Hazel has to contend with?
Normally, a lawn care business experiences variations with regards to inputs in
productivity, quality assurance, wages, and even with the seasons. It is really
difficult for Hazel to achieve uniform inputs in providing services since it varies
in different customers depending on the area of their lawns. Like many service
type businesses, it is highly difficult to measure productivity and the
appropriate compensation.

b. How might these sources of variation impact Hazel’s ability to match supply
and demand?
The variations presented on the previous question affect Hazel's ability to
match supply and demand since as stated, inputs may be less than or more than
adequate to meet the desired outcome. There will be times when supply is not
enough to meet the customer's demand, resulting to miss opportunities or to
incur unwanted costs.
 c. What are some ways she can cope with variation?
Before designing strategies, Hazel must first conduct careful study and analysis
as to causes, nature, correlation, and effect of these variations. She should be
able to identify the significant variables that give large impact on her business
as a whole. Until then, she can create new ideas and develop coping strategies
in order to manage the existing variations. She could resort to imposing certain
criteria and standards that maintain balance between inputs and outputs, hence,
matching supply with demand. This way she can ensure an efficient and
effective operation of her start-up business.

7. Hazel is thinking of making some of her operations sustainable. What are some
ideas she might consider?
Aside from quality assurance, the other ideas that would help Hazel make some
of her operations sustainable include innovations that maximize profit and
reduce costs, offering a wider range of services, reaching new groups of
customers, improving the service quality based on insights from past customers,
and investing on high quality tools and equipment. Hazel can also encourage
her customers to grow beneficial plants that add beauty to the surroundings
which are also healthy for the environment.

4.Your Garden Gloves Case

1. Which crew size had the highest productivity per worker? Which crew size
had the lowest productivity per worker? What are some possible
explanations for these results?

Productivity = output/input
For crew size 2, productivity = 4234/2 =2117
For crew size 3, productivity = 5352/3 = 1784
For crew size 4, productivity = 7860/4 = 1965
 Therefore, the highest productivity is for crew having 2 workers and lowest
productivity is for crew having 3 workers. The team of 2 works better than
team of 3 and also maybe the quality of tools may differ. The team of 2 have
high quality tools while others lack that quality.

2. After a recent storm, a customer called in a panic, saying that she had
planned a garden party for the upcoming weekend and her garden was in
shambles. The owner decided to send a crew of four workers, even though a
two-worker crew would have a higher productivity. Explain the rationale for
the decision.
The decision can be based on the output that the crew of 4 workers
produced. Even though the productivity is lesser than the crew of 2 workers
the highest total output was produced by the crew of 4 workers. Also, the
work should complete as soon as possible so as the number of workers
increase the duration to complete the job decreases.

3. What is a possible qualitative issue that may very well influence

productivity levels that the productivity ratios fail to take into account?
The qualitative issues that may influence productivity levels are,
• Employee loyalty
• Seasonal work – based on location, weather conditions etc,
• Standardization – increases the productivity levels
• Incentive to workers for having higher productivity
• Quality of tools
• Experience of workers