Chapter 4 Review And Discussion Question

Review and Discussion Questions:

1) As a manager, which learning percentage would you prefer) other things being equal), 110 percent or 60 percent? Explain?

Let us examine what each learning curve would mean in a production environment, and see what would be the best answer to the above stated question. In production your employees knowledge base is from learning from doing and when I first looked at the figures I would say that as a manager I would want my employees at a 60 percent learning curve because that means that the cycle time or time to deliver might be shorter compared with the employees at the 110 percent learning curve. Although after reading Learning Curves and the Cyclical Behavior of Manufacturing Industries, I would have to say that maybe the 110 percent might not be so bad after all, of course in the paper it states that this is relative to the type of market you are in. In the article it states that if the market is in a recession than you might not want to introduce new technologies to your workforce as you would want to do it more in a time of boom, “where high rate of production enables the firm to learn more quickly about the new technology.” So to answer the question which percentage would I choose I would have to say that it depends on the market but if the market is in a boom then I think I would try something as the addition of new technology to keep the business profitable and current with new technologies and business practices.

2) What difference does it make if a customer wants a 10,000-unit order produced and delivered all at one time or in 2,500 вЂ" unit batches?

When we take into account the learning curve into this question we must as how would learning curve affect how a particular customer would order. If you look at what the learning curve means, that the more a person does a task the more efficient that person would become, you start to realize that there are three factors that can help you understand how to order. If a customer is ordering a new product the company needs set aside inventory space and so if that space has to accommodate the entire order then the company needs to invest in a storage location, but if the orders are a few at a time the storage location is small. As stated in the Incorporation of Learning Curves in Economic Order Quantity (EOC) and Economic