Running head: POLAR REPRESENTATION

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Polar Representation An Initial Study of the Problems at the Portland Plant Name University

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POLAR REPRESENTATION Polar Representation An Initial Study of the Problems at the Portland Plant The purpose of this work is to explore the performance objectives of the Portland Plant. They have been losing money for years and they are unable to identify the reason. Without internal changes they will be unable to acquire new production contracts and they may be forced to close the business. Portland is unaware that their company values are leading them to extinction. Analysis The five performance objectives (in no specific order) are quality, speed, dependability, flexibility, and cost (Slack, Brandon-Jones, and Johnston, 2013. p. 46). Under current operations, I believe the Portland Plant ranks their objectives in the following order: (1) cost, (2) speed, (3) quality, (4) dependability, (5) flexibility. Portland's emphasis on cost became evident in May 1998 when they discovered they had produced a large quantity of product that did not meet quality specifications. “…we had to throw away 64 jumbo rolls of out-of-specification product. That’s over $100,000 of product scrapped in one run” (“Turnaround at the Portland Plant,” 2007). The main concern in this statement is the monetary value of the loss, not the cause and/or correction of the malfunction or why so much product was created before production was stopped. Because each of the performance objectives has an effect on cost, "... one important way to improve cost performance is to improve the performance of the other operations objectives" (Slack et al., 2013, p.58). If Portland chooses to emphasis quality over cost, operational costs would be expected to decline.

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POLAR REPRESENTATION Under Portland's current SOPs, the discovery of