GADGET TOY COMPANY

Gadget Toy Company’s head office was in Kitchener, Ontario, where it also operated a manufacturing plant and distribution center. Whenever possible, Gadget preferred to manufacture its products in-house.

Joe Huffman, a new project manager at Gadget Toy Company (Gadget), had just submitted a proposal for funding to the new product review committee. He recommended that Gadget introduce, through its retail distribution network, a new children's toy based on a popular cartoon character. J 06 felt that if he could get the product out by Christmas, Gadget c0uld take advantage of what he felt would be strong market demand. However, due to the volatility of the market for these types of toys, Joe could not be certain that the product would have the same level of market acceptance the following year. It was now May 15, 2005, and Joe knew he would have to manage the timing of the project carefully to meet the delivery date of September 2, just 18 weeks away.

Joe was confident of the approval of the project and expected feedback from the committee by the end of the week, at which time he would begin coordinating the launch of the project. At this point Joe had established a preliminary list of information about most activities in the project, as shown in Exhibit 1. Based on his schedule, Joe felt he could start work on some activities immediately, such as finalizing the product design and placing an order for the equipment. However, many of the activities had to be performed sequentially. For example, he could not train the workers until the equipment was installed and the tools for the machine were built. Similarly, he could not order the raw material until the engineering work was complete and the advertising plan was completed, since the advertising plan would influence color selection.

Based on the information he collected in Exhibit 1, he has constructed the project schedule with task normal durations in the file Gadget Toy.mpp. Please help Joe to answer the following questions.

Questions:

1.According to the task normal duration information collected by Joe Huffman in Exhibit 1. what task should Joe watch closely In completing his project, i.e., which of the following is a critical task?

1. Order new equipment .
2. Install equipment
   (c) Train workers

(d) Order raw material .

2. In order to meet the deadline of September 2 ^nd , what is the minimum required crash cost according to Exhibit 1?

3. The minimum crash cost you find in question 2 is too high for Joe. So he looks closely at the logical dependencies in Exhibit 1, and thinks that he can change some of the precedence relationships as well as apply fast tracking techniques to shorten the project duration. He decides to let the task "Order raw material" directly follow "Finalize engineering" and "Finalize ' package and art work". but not follow "Build dies/tools." In addition, he fast tracks the task "Finalize production process" and let it start one week after the task "Train workers" starts. Once you finish revising the precedence relationships for Joe. recalculate the minimum required crash cost that Joe needs to incur to meet the September 2nd deadline.

4. Joe just learns that the equipment delivery (task C) will likely take two weeks longer than he initially expects (i.e. task C normal duration becomes 10 weeks and there are still two weeks for possible crashing). What is the minimum crash cost in this situation if he still includes the revised precedence relationship and fast tracking mentioned in question 3?

Price: $20.89

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