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Principles Of Operation Management Question Paper
Principles Of Operation Management
Course:
Institution: question papers
Exam Year:2011
Question One
Case Study : Amazon.Com- An E-Business
Amazon.com sells books, music and other items over the internet and is one of the pioneers of consumer e-business. Amazon, based in Seattle, started by filling all orders using books purchased from a distributor in response to customer orders. This practice differs from that of a traditional bookstore, which usually purchases directly from publishers and stocks books in anticipation of customers orders. Today, Amazon has six warehouses where it holds inventory. Amazon stocks best-selling books, though it still gets other titles from distributors or publishers. It uses the U.S Postal Service and other package carriers such as UPS and FedEx to send books to customers.
Amazon has continued to expand the set of products that it sells online. Besides books and music, Amazon has added many product categories such as toys, apparel, electronics, jewelry and shoes. After several years of losses, Amazon has been profitable since 2003.
Several brick-and-mortar players including traditional booksellers such as Borders and Barnes & Noble have also started selling using the internet channel. Barnes and Noble have set up Barnes&Noble.com as a separate company, whereas Borders uses Amazon to fulfill its online orders after initially trying to operate an online business. In case of Barnes and Noble, the retail store and the online supply chains share warehousing and transportation to some extent. This is a departure from the company’s original strategy, when Barnes&Noble.Com was not visible in any Barnes & Noble bookstore.
Several questions arise concerning how Amazon is structured and how traditional booksellers have responded:
1.Why is Amazon building more warehouses as it grows? How many warehouses should it have and where should they be located?
2.What advantages does selling books via the internet provide over a traditional bookstore? Are there any disadvantages of selling via the internet?
3.Should Amazon stock every book it sells?
4.What advantage can brick-and-mortar players derive from setting up an online channel? How should they use the two channels to gain maximum advantage?
5.What would identify as the competitive priorities of Amazon.com? Explain.
6.What are the challenges of deploying operations on an online platform for a company operating in Kenya?
7.For what products does the e-commerce channel offer the greatest advantage? What characterizes these products?
(25 marks)
Question Two
Define work measurement and document the various methods used in measuring work. Using five different types of jobs as examples show the concept of work measurement can be applied in operations management. (25 marks)
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