Case Report: Kristen’s Cookie Company

Case Report: Kristen’s Cookie Company

This is the first selective case report. Work with your case group members (2-3 people per group). Fill in your names and section number in the header. No discussion with anyone outside your team is allowed.  Below, write your answers to Questions 1-5.  Your analysis should be based on the assumptions listed after the questions.  If you need to make additional assumptions to answer a question, clearly state them, logically defend them, and then proceed to answer the question accordingly.

Please format your report in the following way:

• Limit your answers to 2 pages (excluding cover page and any attachments). Use 11 pt font or larger and 1.5 line spacing. The idea is to answer the questions concisely.
• Draw diagrams in black or gray lines on white background, because your report will be printed in black and white for grading.
• Submit one file per group. Attach all diagrams to your report, and keep this file letter-sized (8.5x11), otherwise your report will not be printed correctly.

The case is due midnight of Sept 13, Sunday. We will discuss the answers on Jan 16. Please print out your answers for your own reference during the class discussion.

Please leave rest of this page blank. No answer should appear on this cover page.

1. Enter your answer and supporting arguments for question 1 here. Include all details necessary to fully justify your answer to the question. Please draw a process flow diagram (e.g., using MS Word functionality). You can include the flow diagram here or as a third page in addition to your 2-page report, but please submit only one document on ForClass.

It will take 27 minutes to fill a rush order. We came to this answer by adding up the time it takes to make a dozen cookies in each step of the production process. The order processing step takes 1 minute. Adding the ingredients to the bowl and mixing takes 6 minutes, regardless of how many cookies are being made. Spooning a dozen cookies onto a tray takes 2 minutes. One dozen cookies takes 10 minutes to bake on one tray. The cooling process takes 5 minutes. Finally, it takes 2 minutes to pack each order and 1 minute to accept payment for the order. Therefore, all of these steps combine add up to 27 minutes to fill a rush order.

1. Enter your answer and supporting arguments for question 2 here.

In order to minimize the amount of time and maximize the amount of orders processed, there are two possible scenarios. The first is if each order has different ingredients, therefore, you can only add ingredients to the bowl and mix for one dozen at a time. In this scenario, you can fill 8 orders. We found this answer by dividing 4 hours by 27 minutes, which gave us 8.8. However we rounded down to 8 orders since you cannot make an eighth of an order. The other scenario is if an ideal situation occurred in which there were always two orders called at the same time for the same ingredients in the cookies. In this case, you can save time in adding to the bowl and mixing for each three dozen. Therefore, it would only take 48  minutes to make the two dozen. We found this by adding the full process without the adding and mixing component, which adds up to 21 minutes. Then we multiplied this number by 2 for each dozen to get 42 minutes as the total cookie process for the 2 dozen without mixing. Then, if you add the 6 minutes of combined adding and mixing time gives you a total of 48 minutes to make the two dozen. This gives us 24 minutes per order. In the 4 hours you can fill 10 orders, as four hours divided by 24 minutes gave us 10. We considered the same scenario as above with three dozen of the same cookies being ordered at once, however, doing so would take longer than 1 hour so it is not possible within this business.

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