Scenario: You are the new executive that oversees the operations at a large fulfillment center for livestock in the local area, such as baby chicks, goats, horses, and other farm style animals. It will be assumed that you know the laws and so forth in shipping live animals, but you have to prepare for a possible scorching summer and with the heat, it makes the refrigeration on the top of your priorities.
This is also assumed:
The refrigeration units on the vehicles haven’t been serviced in two-years due to cost constraints that have come about that were not planned for.
Your competition has been taking a lot of your business to top things off and local farming customers are choosing them, but you don’t know why exactly.
Again, the care for the animals isn’t in question, as you have regular traveling veterinarians that specialize in farm animals, however, your contracts with the current vets are set to renew before the summer, so you’d have to take that into account as well as far as their expenditures. Possible longer term contract negotiations for a reduced premium to help offset costs?
From prior year’s sales history, you know that you also have to prepare mid-summer for the warming units that are needed for the wintertime months, which that equipment is up to date.
For the sake of length, there are no monetary costs posted or expected in actual dollar figures. i.e., You can’t expected to know how much you will spend if I haven’t told you the financial limitations you are working from, so this project is for the conjecture of principles and operating theories to help alleviate some of the scenario’s burdens. What would you do as a leader?
For the final project, you are to write a 750-word submission where you detail the foreseen issues at hand, and to be planned upon, and how you as the operations executive handles the leadership decisions you intend for this scenario. What are you going to plan out? What about your competition? Why are they doing better? There are lots of out of the box ideas you can take from this semester to aid in your plan.
Not included with the 750-word minimum, you must also present a SWOT analysis for review by the ownership of the company. This needs to simply be three to five bullet points per quadrant and can be shown as:
Strengths – the warming gear for the winter is up to date on inspections and so on
Weaknesses – this and that
…and so on with opportunities and threats.
