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Operations Management Question Paper

Operations Management

Course:

Exam Year:2012

Question One
Taxi Stockholm

Taxi Stockholm may be over 100 years old and organized as a cooperative, but it has become one of the largest and most technically advanced taxi companies in the world. ‘They are absolutely trustworthy’, according to one satisfied customer. ‘I am not the only one who chooses them even when they are not first in the taxi queue’. The company has a policy of choosing reliability over speed according to CEO Anders Malmqvist. ‘Compared to some of our rivals, productivity in our call centre is low. Our workers don’t answer as many calls per hour, but that’s our choice. The focus of our business is not how many calls we can answer but how many customers we can satisfy.’ Such dependability is helped by Taxi Stockholm’s automatic routing technology. Phone for a cab and a voice-response system identifies your location (verified by pushing the appropriate buttons on the telephone) and the system finds and instructs the nearest available cab to your location. Plans include extending the technology to provide precise estimated times of arrival every time a cab is called and automatic call back to confirm each reservation. ‘My job,’ says Malmqvist ‘is to get the fleet out when customers demand it, not the other way round.’
(Adapted from Operations Management by Nigel Slack, Stuart Chambers and Robert Johnston, fifth edition, 2007)
.
Required
a) What do you identify as the key competitive priorities of Taxi Stockholm? Support your answer with details from the excerpt. (6 marks)
b) What lessons can Kenyan Taxi operators learn from Taxi Stockholm case? (5 marks)
c) It may be challenging to apply best practices of taxi Stockholm in a city like Nairobi. Explain the challenges a taxi operator will face. (10 marks)
d) What scheduling priority is used by the taxi operator? Support your answer with details from the excerpt. (4 marks)

Question Two

Routing and Scheduling Fresh Milk Collection

Wiseman Dairies is a major supplier of liquid milk, buying, producing and delivering to customers throughout Great Rift Valley Region. The company’s growth has been achieved
through its strong relationship with farmer suppliers, ongoing investment in dairies and distribution depots, and excellent customer care. But unless the company can schedule its collection and delivery activities effectively, both its costs and its customer service could suffer. This is why it uses a computerized routing and scheduling system and a geographic information system to plan its transport operations. Previously the company’s tankers completed two trips in a day – one involving offloading at locally based collection points, the other delivering direct to the company’s factory. Now the same vehicles complete three round trips a day because of additional collections and a scheduling system ( The TruckStops system). Describing the change to its milk collection operations, group transport manager William Bett explains: ‘The network of farms that supplies our milk is constantly evolving, and we’re finding that we now tend to deal with a smaller number of larger farms, often within a narrower radius. That gives us the opportunity to use our vehicles more economically, but it also means we need to keep updating our collection routes. In the past the company scheduled collections manually with the aid of maps, but we simply couldn’t keep up with the complexity of the task with a manual system. In any case, TruckStops does the scheduling much more efficiently in a fraction of the time. One of the challenges in scheduling milk collection is that the vehicles start off each day empty and ideally end up fully loaded. It’s the exact reverse of a normal delivery operation.’ The scheduling system has also proved invaluable in forward planning and ‘first-cut’ costing of collections from potential new suppliers. By using the system for progressive refinements to its regular schedules, Wiseman has been able to create what amount to ‘look-up charts’ that give approximate costs for collections from different locations.
(Adapted from Operations Management by Nigel Slack, Stuart Chambers and Robert Johnston, fifth edition, 2007)

Required
a) Explain how TruckStops system has helped Wiseman Dairies increase capacity utilization and reduce operational cost. (10 marks)
b) Though TruckStops system has improved the operations of Wiseman Dairies significantly, you cannot say the system delivers an optimal scheduling solution. Explain why this is the case. (5 marks)
c) What priority rules do you think are built into the TruckStops system for milk collections?
(6 marks)
d) State any four objectives of work-center scheduling for Wiseman Dairies (4 marks)

Question Three
Search the web for “Operations Benchmarking”. Detail the operations benchmarking of one organization which will be of interest to you in your web search. ( 20 marks)

Operations Management Question Paper

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