National Cranberry Cooperative Case Study Essay

Reflecting on the simulation one of the things that should have changed would have been changing the interval of the trucks so more of the product could have been transported from the

The trucks will continue unloading up to 4,600/600 minutes after 7 pm and until 02.40 am and the processing will continue until 8 am. At the same time, to empty the next slot of berries, the remaining quantity of berries will be arrived. The total amount of berries that will be processed is 7200 bbls (600 x 12).

* Will have to buy new dryers to account for increase in wet berries processed through dechaffing

We began our analysis by searching for bottlenecks that existed in the current system. It was easily identified that major issues existed in the ordering process. Without calculations, you could tell the reorder point was too low since the historical plots showed inventory levels at zero for two or more days at a time. The number of jobs in customer orders showed correlating spikes at the same time of the inventory outages. We reviewed the utilization and queues of the other stations in the system but were hesitant to make in immediate changes since we were not entirely certain the effects of correcting the inventory policy.

Martinez Company’s relevant range of Production is 7,500 to 12,500 units. When it produces and sells 10,000 units, its unit costs are as follows:

In order for freight to successfully merge onto the Intellimerge, logic is in place that determines priority to lanes, and increased priority to any line that has a full or nearly-full accumulator. Because line 6 is from two ART lines it is given more priority to reduce downtime to the team members working on the ART lines. The recirculation line also receives special priority in order to prevent a “gridlock situation. Freight will also pass through a gap optimizer belt to optimize gaps that were established upstream. This is essential to present equally spaced product to a sorter, insuring a correct divert. Lane 6 is special because it can have up to twice the amount of product coming to it so a blow through mode was created for when the lane becomes 100% full. When lane 6 is full all other lanes will be disabled and lane 6 will continue to release without building slugs. Lane 6 will continue to stay in blow through mode for 10 seconds after becoming less than 100% full.

The purpose of this report is to apprise the outcomes of the Producers Cooperative board’s decision to pay out annual profits differentially as determined by individual department sales where the desired results and unintended consequences resulted from the decisions are discussed. Additionally, the appropriate performance measures for a cooperative success are suggested while evaluation on the option of reducing the cooperative stock’s prices to reduce member’s personal money tied up in cooperative stock are also carried out.

* Loads were picked up from location A and delivered to one of 5 warehouses, placed on another truck with optimized route for location B (software driven route optimization)

The owners of the farm have found a correlation between the weight of a cow, and the cost of feeding it, in

With the bottleneck occurring so early in the process, it is critical that the early steps become more efficient. Hiring more personnel for this step would help ease the back up here but more staff would also increase expenses at a time when the company is trying to reduce costs. An alternative fix would be schedule regular pick ups and deliveries to reduce the uncertainty and efficiency of the way drop offs are occurring. Additionally, if pickups were scheduled, costs could be reduced as LAA could rely on their six trucks to make 4 scheduled pick up/deliveries and could eliminate the need to outsource to a private company. Another thought to address this step is to completely outsource the pick ups, thereby eliminating the cost of truck fuel, maintenance and other expenses. The major problem with the current delivery system in place is that drop offs can occur at any time during a 16-hour work day.

| | | | | | | | | | | | | |75000 | |100000 | |125000 | |150000 | |175000 | |200000 | | |  | |  | |  | |  | |  | |  | |Direct Labor |4.00 |  |3.90 |  |3.80 |  |3.70 |  |3.80 |  |4.00 | |Material |2.00

Looking at the Sensitivity analysis report produced by Solver (appendix 2.1, the sensitivity analysis on the previous model), we see that the shadow price for Grade A tomatoes is $271.50 (per 1000 lbs). This means that RBC should be willing to pay up to a maximum of $271.50 to obtain an additional 1000 lbs of extra grade A tomatoes without making a loss. This is true for up to an additional 600,000 lbs. Beyond that, the value added by the extra tomatoes would be insufficient to be profitable. Hence the management of RBC should evaluate the amount of profit they wish to make on the AA batch and accordingly set their max price well below the shadow price. If their marketing strategy dictates that it is more important to capture market share, RBC may

* Demand variability is not easily supported by employing Transit Point methodology. If there is an urgent demand for goods in excess of truckload capacity then it can lead to huge additional cost.

Netessine, S., & Shumsky, R. (2002). Introduction to the theory and practice of yield management. INFORMS Transactions on Education, 3(1), 34–39. 
Retrieved from http://archive.ite.journal.informs.org/Vol3No1/NetessineShumsky/

| This fits our production system adequately. Since our assumed working cycle time is 6sec(=10 cycles/min) and it meets the requirement of 1300cars/day. On the other side, this is capital intensive but not as expensive as the first one.