...Memo To: InterClean First-Level Managers From: Vanessa Sutton, Sales Manager Date: March 15, 2010 Subj.: Manager Behavior As you know the merger with EnviroTech, Inc. is approaching finalization. We would like this transaction to be as smooth as possible; we feel that EnviroTech will provide us with the opportunity to become a full service operation. In order to make this a successful move, all first-level managers are ask to restructure job responsibilities which should provide new potential for employee career advancement. As with any change, there will be concerns and questions. Your role as managers are to explain how manager’s behavior can affect the productivity of his or her workers; describe the types of management action that align with employment laws and those that do not; and describe best practices for working within a diverse work environment. I encourage you to respond in a positive and supportive manner. Your roles as managers will be vital to making this a successful transaction; there are several factors that affect the productivity of workers such as people skills, management skills and the most important attitude. Manager’s behavior can help establish a positive open organizational climate, which will help its team members feel safe and be more productive at their job. Insure that all your employees know what is expected of them and what’s available for them to accomplish their jobs and promote quality customer satisfaction. Mangers should...
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...Memo I wanted to bring to your attention a memo I received from quality control and the proposed solution. Quality control sent a memo out Monday regarding toy whistles: lots 436 to 449. While the toys were going through the required inspection, the whistles were found to contain a higher content of lead then what is required by the U.S. regulations for children. These whistles fall under the elementary toy division and were made to complete an order that would be shipped to South America at the end of the week and the cost of remaking the product would be $100,000. Three solutions were proposed: cancel the shipment to South America, ship the half completed order and then send the final parts after they are fixed, or ship the toys to an area with less strict criteria. A1. Present 3 possible decision alternatives A1a. Alternative Process Human Resources has taken the best interest of the company and has concluded on three decisions to resolve the issue presented by quality control. This company understands that making a good decision does not end with making the decision, but also needs follow-up. As presented in the Task 2 Webinar there are Decision Models that can be used to aid in identifying, processing and evaluating any decision (Jewell, 2011). The Third Decision Model was used to aid HR in the three options presented in this memo. The toy company has lost revenue on a shipment of toy whistles. The company has to decide how to resolve the loss in revenue while keeping...
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...Re: Discussion on the process of selecting decision alternatives for the whistle issue of the toy company, evaluating theadvantages, disadvantages, legal, financial and ethical considerations involved in the various alternatives.The purpose of this memo is to outline three possible decision alternatives to address the problem of small lead traces tocontents of metal whistles produced by a U.S toy company due for shipment to South America; by discussing the methods forthe selection of decision alternatives, the advantages, disadvantages, ethical considerations, financial and legal prospective ofthe each decisions . The memo will further justify and analyze the impact of the recommended decision on customerrelationship as well as demonstrate the role of ethics and social responsibility in choosing this decision.While important financial or strategic information is used in the decision-making process, business ethics has become anincreasingly popular tool used in making decisions. Business ethics is commonly referred to as the professional judgment orethical perspectives used by an individual or a company executive team in resolving moral or ethical problems in business. Inresolving the problem of the lead-contaminated metal whistles, I will discuss three possible decision alternatives, methods ofselection of the alternatives, pros and cons of the alternatives as well as potential legal, financialand ethical consideration involved in the selection. Ethical decisions-making can be...
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...MEMO TO: CEO DATE: 4/11/12 SUBJECT: Toy Whistles The purpose of this memo is to discuss possible alternatives for whistles that were produced with traces of lead that are above the legal limit. This problem was identified by the quality assurance department during routine testing. There are three possible alternatives to address the problem regarding the whistles. The first alternative is to ship the whistles as scheduled knowing the trace amount of lead is considered unsafe by U.S. standards. An advantage to this solution is that initially the company would not experience the financial loss of reproducing the product but there could be some legal issues as the whistles do not meet the manufacturing regulations standards. This could in turn result in more extensive financial expense from fines, legal costs, and possible recall and reproduction. Most importantly, this is a highly unethical approach to this problem. It is irresponsible to subject children to a product that can be potentially harmful to them. The second alternative is to ship the product to a country where it meets the country’s regulatory requirements. An advantage is that the company will not experience any financial loss as the product will not be held to U.S. standards of safety. The internal damage from this scenario is that the quality assurance department will no longer deem the work they are contributing as meaningful. Most importantly, this is once again an issue of unethical practices as the company...
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...Memo To: Alan Mulally From: Travis Harper Date: March 6, 2012 Re: SWOT and Value Chain Analysis The purpose of this memo is offer the Ford management team advice and recommendations based on an internal and external analysis of the Ford Motor Company. A SWOT analysis will be conducted and the memo will outline and explain the processes involved with the analysis. A SWOT analysis will provide the decision makers of the company with information about the positive and negative aspects of both the external and internal environments currently facing Ford. The internal analysis will provide better insight into the strength and weaknesses of the company, and the external analysis will recognize opportunity and threats presented by the external environment. In addition to the SWOT analysis, the memo will provide an analysis of the primary and support activities that make up Ford's Value Chain, which is a systematic way of examining how these activities create customer value. External Analysis The external analysis was conducted by scanning and evaluating Ford's external environment. It is important that both the general and specific sectors of the Ford's external environment are scanned in order to identify the opportunities, which are positive trends, and threats, which are negative trends, facing the company. When analyzing the general environment of Ford, the economic sector should be a major focus for the company. A major aspect of Ford's decline has been due to poor economic...
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...controversy responsible for the conversation or discussion. It is the stimulus for what is being said. The main issue within this memo surrounds the rising cost of employee healthcare benefits. The author of the document, Salvador Monella, is the Senior Vice President of Human Resources. This information is vital in proving that Monella has a vested interest and responsibility in reducing the cost of health benefits, paid for by Penn-Mart. Browne and Keeley (2012) proceed to explain how a conclusion is a statement or set of statements that the writer or speaker wants you to believe. The conclusion within this memo is that Penn-Mart should institute a wellness initiative in support of lowering the cost of health care for employees.. Monella then goes on to support the conclusions by providing high level reasoning. What are the Reasons? The text defines reasons as beliefs, evidence, metaphors, analogies, and other statements offered to support or justify conclusions (Browne and Keeley, 2012, p. 28). The reason Monella suggested Penn-Mart institute the wellness initiative consisting of the mandatory health screening is to reduce company spending on company-sponsored health plans. Which Words or Phrases are Ambiguous? Ambiguity refers to the existence of multiple possible meanings for a word or phrase (Browne and Keeley, 2012, p. 41). The memo has several phrases that are ambiguous. The first example...
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...A cost analysis on the relationship between cost and quality in the manufacture of the WGU Widget 3.0 has been conducted and the findings will be discussed in this memo. Taking into consideration the costs associated with the production of Widget 3.0, we will discuss the following: Appraisal Costs, Prevention Costs, and finally Failure Costs both internal and external. Appraisal costs relate to the costs of ensuring quality and for uncovering defects. These costs are related to inspections, testing, test equipment, labs, quality audits, and field testing. Prevention costs include both planning and administrative systems, interaction with vendors, training, quality control procedures, and emphasis on design. Failure costs are broken into two subcategories, Internal and External failure. Internal failures include defective material, incorrect machine settings, carelessness, and mishandling of materials. External failure is associated with defective products or poor service provided to the customer. Appraisal costs and quality considerations for Widget 3.0 production Analysis indicates 45% of the final cost of the product is attributable to inspection, testing, and quality audits. This portion of the cost is broken down into 80% to inspection of materials received from vendors, 15% quality audit of the final product, and 5% testing of each component of Widget 3.0. Prevention costs associated with Widget 3.0 35% of the final costs are considered Preventative in nature....
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...Memo TO: John Doe – Supervisor FROM: Jennifer Crawford Date: May 20, 2015 Re: WGU GHT1 Task 1 There are three types of costs when quality considerations are made, appraisal costs, prevention costs, and failure costs. Failure costs also include external failure and internal failure. A detailed explaination is included below: Appraisal costs are costs that the company incurs to ensure qaulity or uncover defects. This includes but is not limited to costs such as testing equipment, inspections of materials, labs, quality audits, field-testing, and other inspections costs. Prevention costs are the costs associatied with preventing defects from occurring. This includes costs such as designing a better quailty product, increased maintenance on equipment, quality control procedures, training of employees, planning and administration procedures, working with vendors, and any extra time that is used that is devoted to decreasing the probablilty of a defective workmanship. Failure costs are incurred bye defective parts or products or by faulty services. Internal failures are failures that are discovered during the production process or prior to the customer ever coming into direct contact with the product. There are many reasons that internal failures may occur which range from defective materials, incorrect methods or processing, or faulty equipment. External failures are failures that are discovered after the customer has the product. External failutres can become...
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...memo To: John Doe - Supervisor | | From: | | CC: | | Date: May 2, 2013 | | Re: WGU QHT1 Task 1 | | | | There are three types of costs when quality considerations are made, appraisal costs, prevention costs, and failure costs. Failure costs include internal and external failures. An explanation of these costs are listed below: * Appraisal costs are costs that the company incurs to ensure quality or uncover defects. This includes but is not limited to costs such as testing equipment, inspection of materials, labs, quality audits, field-testing, and other inspection costs. * Prevention costs are the costs associated with preventing defects from occurring. This includes costs such as the designing a better quality product, increased maintenance on equipment, quality control procedures, training of employees, planning and administration procedures, working with vendors, and any extra time that is devoted to decreasing the probability of defective workmanship. * Defective parts or products by faulty services cause failure costs. * Internal failures are failures that are discovered during the production process or prior to the customer ever coming into contact with the product. There are many reasons the internal failures can occur including defective materials, incorrect methods or processing, or faulty equipment. * External failures are failures that are discovered after the customer has the product. This type of failure...
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...In this internal Cliffside Holding Company memo, Mr. Anil Ravaswami, Vice President of Human Resources of writes to Ms. Cynthia Castle, CEO to discuss the proposition of a leadership development program for junior insurance executives. Ms. Forsythe of Cliffside Holdings has proposed the new program and identified the total cost to be “$100,000.00 per year plus approximately the same amount for lost time on the job.” Mr. Ravaswami discusses the reasons he believes Cliffside Holding Company should not fund this new development program. The memo and rationale will be analyzed using the steps for Critical Thinking modeled in Asking the Right Questions by Brown and Keeley (2015). What are the issue and conclusion? The issue, or question being raised is apparent in the first sentence of the memo, “That we establish and fund a new leadership development program of our junior insurance executives.” Ravaswami writes that several of the senior leadership members at CHCM have not gone through such training and despite this, are all very “successful and effective without such programs” He goes on to point out that personality traits such as ambition, self confidence and intelligence were possessed by several known leaders throughout history show that leaders are not made, but born. The conclusion, as highlighted in the ‘Conclusion and Recommendations’ of the memo is “CHCM should not invest in the proposed initiative to send its junior executives for annual leadership training.” In...
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...Recognizing Contract Risk and Opportunities Memo Law 531 Charles Cook January 31, 2011 Recognizing Contract Risk and Opportunities Memo DATE: January 31, 2011 TO: Kevin Grant Harold Smith Leon Ther FROM: Michelle Boldt RE: Banking Software Contract Issues Due to recent negotiations with the binding contract between Span Systems and Citizen-Schwarz AG (C-S), necessary changes have come to light. After thorough discussions between myself , Span Systems legal team, and CS's negotiator, Leon Ther, three major amendments within the contract have been agreed upon. Contract clause breaches Performance While performance has been under par in relationship to C-S's requirements, debate over the additional changes within the product specifications have clouded efforts. Communications and Reporting The change in project management disrupted the flow of work in respect to communication and project expectations. While it was a deficiency on Span's ability to work continuously through the changes, with the weakness identified and addressed, this issue can be corrected and avoided in the future. Requirements Changes In the recent past, C-S presented numerous changes in specifications, time requirements placed additional hardships on the production and design team. Thus, disrupting the agreed upon time frame. Legal principles The majority of clause issues within the contract revolve around a lack of communication. While Span addresses...
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...To: James Hodges Date: 23 February 2016 From: XXXXXXXX Facility: XXXXXXXXX Subject: Quality Costs Jim, the purpose of this memo is to update you on the quality issues we’re having at the Coachella packing house. Rejection costs are mounting due to the quality deficiencies not being addressed at this location. The costs can be boiled down to: Prevention, Appraisal and Failure Costs Let’s first start off with Prevention. There are too many choice peppers making it onto the packing line, which means they’re making it to the customer. The choice peppers should be diverted to the cull buyer and not make it into the packing house. A 2-3 hour grading refresher course for both the harvesting and packing house personnel will impact production for half a day, but the benefits will outweigh the cost and inconvenience of the down time. Aweta, the manufacturer of the processing line will be contacted to come out and re-calibrate the sorting line cameras and sizers. Costs incurred will be minimal, as this is part of the maintenance contract. And this can also be done in conjunction with the grading course refresher. Downtime will be minimal. The second cost center is Appraisal. Currently we only have two quality control inspectors, we need two more. Having two additional inspectors will allow us to have one dedicated inspector in the receiving bay. This inspector will be able to halt any suspect shipments before they even make it into the packing house. This will...
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...Supervisor FROM: SUBJECT: Three types of cost when quality considerations are made Given the highly competitive nature of today’s markets we as a company must provide high quality products to survive. Quality itself has become a major competitive factor and in many ways is a contributing factor in success or failure. The intent of this memo is to identify, explain and evaluate the three types of cost associated with quality. The three types of cost of quality are Prevention costs, Appraisal costs and Failure cost (Both internal and External) (Stevenson, 2009 pg. 421) The first type of cost is Prevention costs. Prevention refers to all costs associated with preventing the failure or non-conforming product or service occurring in the first place. Some specific examples of prevention costs are development of equipment, maintenance and calibration of inspection tools, audits of supplier materials, quality training of employees and the development and implementation of quality control processes. Although initial investments are required to implement prevention costs, they are often considered to be the least expensive cost of quality as many preventive costs and / or processes are repeatable with minimal reoccurring expense. The second type of cost is Appraisal cost. Throughout the process of a product or service being produced an inspection of that product or service must be performed in order to make sure that it is conforming to the quality standard set forth by the customer....
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...Memo of Management Theories Erin Young AIU Online BUSN300 IP4 August 13, 2013 Susan Wells Manager Wells Industries 15-475 Akamai Ct. Kaneohe, HI 96744 Dear Mrs. Wells, Per our previous discussion, I have found an example for each of the two specific theories that you had requested within the company, IKEA: * Moving toward an employee empowerment culture in the human resource area * The theory of penetration pricing in the marketing area IKEA is a Swedish company that designs and sells ready to assemble furniture, appliances, and home accessories. By the end of 2012 IKEA’s revenue was €27.628 billion and employed 139,000 people. IKEA’s human resource philosophy believe that employees were more productive and committed when the company took care of them and their needs. The company adopted a paternalistic stance toward employees and their needs and promoted employee empowerment. Its’ culture is characterized by a family-like quality that makes relationships between employees strong and open. The payoff outweighed the cost, employee turnover fell drastically from 76% in 2001, to 35% in 2003 which lowered the company’s costs in recruiting and training replacements. I believe that keeping the benefits and employee policies flexible allow management adapt to every type of employee which keep employees happy and production up while employee turnovers decrease. IKEA’s penetration pricing strategy is based on cost leadership; products are sold 30 to...
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...Merger Memo Learning Team B: Kathryn Alvino, Nadia Ge, Delores Jones, Wanda Soderberg-Beck University of Phoenix Author Note: This paper is being submitted on January 30, 2015, for Dr. Kale Kruger’s HCS/514 Managing in Today’s Health Care Organizations course. Merger Memo MEMORANDUM TO: All Employees FROM: Management Team DATE: January 30, 2015 SUBJECT: Healthcare International Organization Merger CC: Leadership Team In response to the recent merging of Healthcare International and Care Alliance Health Systems, the management teams of both medical facilities has come together to write a memo on the merger and the effect that it will have within our new organization. Our organization will now be called Care Alliance International Systems. This memo will discuss how the merger will affect our organizational culture (on products and services), how organizational behavior affects overall quality, and how organizational behavior affects competition and human relations. In addition to that, this memo will review how job design, work processes, and performance expectations effect our organization. Lastly, this memo will discuss how the management team will ensure the success of the new Care Alliance International systems. Organizational Culture: Care Alliance Health Systems is dedicated to providing a healthy culture within our facilities so that we may maintain...
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