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Group Assignment


NAME: KRISHANAVENI A/P PALANI
IC NO: 940416065124
MATRIC NO:012014110271


Question :

You and your roommate are preparing to start Cookie Company in your on campus apartment. The company will provide
fresh cookies to starving students late at night. You need to evaluate the preliminary design for the company's production
process to figure out many variables, including what prices to charge, whether you will be able to make a profit, and how
many orders to accept.

Business Concept

Your idea is to bake fresh cookies to order, using any combination of ingredients that the buyer wants. The cookies will be
ready for pickup at your apartment within an hour.
Several factors will set you apart from competing products such as store-bought cookies. First, your cookies will
be completely fresh. You will not bake any cookies before receiving the order; therefore, the buyer will be getting cookies
that are literally hot out of the oven.
Second, you guarantee completely fresh cookies. In short, you will have the freshest, most exotic cookies
anywhere, available right on campus.

The Production Process

Baking cookies is simple: mix all the ingredients in a food processor; spoon out the cookie dough onto a tray; put the
cookies into the oven; bake them; take the tray of cookies out of the oven; let the cookies cool; and, finally, take the cookies
off the tray and carefully pack them in a box. You and your roommate already own all the necessary capital equipment: one
food processor, cookie trays, and spoons. Your apartment has a small oven that will hold one tray at a time. Your landlord
pays for all the electricity. The variable costs, therefore, are merely the cost of the ingredients (estimated to be $.60/dozen),
the cost of the box in which the cookies are packed ($.10 per box; each box holds a dozen cookies), and your time (what
value do you place on your time?).
A detailed examination of the production process, whi ch specifies how long each of the steps will take, follows. The
first step is to take an order, which your roommate has figured out how to do quickly and with 100 percent accuracy.
(Actually, you and your roommate devised a method using the campus electronic mail system to accept orders and to inform
customers when their orders will be ready for pickup. Because this runs automati cally on your personal computer, it does
not take any of your time.) Therefore, this step will be ignored in further analysis.
You and your roommate have timed the necessary physical operations. The first physical production step is to wash
out the mixing bowl from the previous batch, add all of the ingredients, and mix them in your food processor. The mixing
bowls hold ingredients for up to three dozen cookies. You then dish up the cookies, one dozen at a time, onto a cookie tray.
These activities take six minutes for the washing and mixing steps, regardless of how many cookies are being made in the
batch. That is, to mix enough dough and ingredients for two dozen cookies takes the same six minutes as one dozen
cookies. However, dishing up the cookies onto the tray takes two minutes per tray.
The next step, performed by your roommate, is to put the cookies in the oven and set the thermostat and timer, which
takes about one minute. The cookies bake for the next nine minutes. So total baking time is 10 minutes, during the first
minute of which your roommate is busy setting the oven. Because the oven only holds one tray, a second dozen takes an
additional 10 minutes to bake.
Your roommate also performs the last steps of the process by first removing the cookies from the oven and putting
them aside to cool for five minutes, then carefully packing them in a box and accepting payment. Removing the cookies
from the oven takes only a negligible amount of time, but it must be done promptly. It takes two minutes to pack each dozen
and about one minute to accept payment for the order.
That is the process for producing cookies by the dozen in Kristen's Cookie Company. As experienced bakers know, a
few simplifications were made in the actual cookie production process. For example, the first batch of cookies for the night
requires preheating the oven. However, such complexities will be put aside for now. Begin your analysis by developing a
process flow diagram of the cookie-making process.

Key Questions to Answer before You Launch the Business

To launch the business, you need to set prices and rules for accepting orders. Some issues will be resolved only after you
get started and try out different ways of producing the cookies. Before you start, however, you at least want a preliminary
plan, with as much as possible specified, so that you can do a careful calculation of how much time you will have to devote
to this business each night, and how much money you can expect to make. For example, when you conduct a market
survey to determine the likely demand, you will want to specify exactly what your order policies will be. Therefore,
answering the following operational questions should help you:

1. How long will it take you to fill a rush order?

one order takes 26min (6+2+1+9+5+3). Considering that rush order might come
right after the start of previous order, to wait for mixer and oven, 10min (6+2+10-8)
should be added. Therefore, 36min (26+10) to fill a rush cookies.
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2. How many orders can you fill in a night, assuming you are open four hours
each night?


4 hours per each night= 4 hours x 60 minutes
= 240 minutes

Cycle Time
= (Setting thermostat and Timer) + (Baking Cookies)
= 1 minute + 9 minute
= 10 minutes

Maximum number of orders we can fill in a night= (Number of minutes per night-
Duration of First Setup) /
Cycle Time + 1
= ((240 26) / 10) + 1
= 22.4 orders
~ 22 orders

This is because the first order takes 26 minutes for the first batch of cookies to finish
and each subsequent batch takes 10 minutes because it has reached steady state.
We take 4 hours worth of time, minus off 26 minutes for the first batch and then
divide by ten to get the number of orders.

3.How much of your own and your roommates valuable time will it take to fill
each order?

Own Time:

Mixing Ingredients 6 minutes
Dishing out cookies onto tray 2 minutes

Total Time 8 minutes

Roommates Time:

Setting thermostat and timer 1 minutes
Packing the cookies 2 minutes
Collecting payment 1 minutes

Total Time 4 minutes

Our group defines valuable time as time that can be used to do other kinds of
productive work. The processes carried out by me, mixing the ingredients and
dishing the cookies onto the tray, takes up 8 minutes of my valuable time. This is
because I have to be doing work. However, only 4 minutes of my roommates
valuable time is used because the 9 minutes (baking of cookies) and 5 minutes
(cooling the cookies) can be used to do other more productive work.

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3. Should you offer special rates for rush orders? Suppose you have just put
a tray of cookies into the oven and someone calls up with a "crash priority"
order for a dozen cookies of a different flavor. Can you fill the priority order
while still fulfilling the order for the cookies that are already in the oven? If
not, how much of a premium should you charge for filling the rush order?

Yes we should offers special rates for rush orders because there are our
first priority. If the crash priority order a new flavor I will do it n will charge a
bit more compare to the rush orders. I will charge a each filling extra 50
sens.