Pages 11-114 : Subprocesses and CascadingCritical Path Method
Please thoroughly review pages 111 to 114 from the textbook for this group report. If there are 6 students in your group, write a report with 6 examples from your real-life and past workplaces, which you believe one of the items from pages 112-113 applies or was applied in that example, as per your observations. Please describe the situation, and then provide notes on if a certain case from those noted on pages 112-113 would have been applied in that situation, it could have made a difference toward improving that process/situation in that real-life example.
Each group is needed to submit one written report with their 6 examples listed, along with a brief explanation of the following:
1) What is the situation or your observed scenario/process (describe it at a high level)
2) Which of the cases from pages 112-113 applies to enabling some improvement in that scenario/example that you have provided. Explain how applying that solution (from pages 112-113) could improve or could have improved the process, and provide your observation and high-level analysis. Here is an example from a past report submitted by the students:
Example: "I am an international student and work at Tim Hortons. A year ago, the restaurant was only serving through the skip the dishes and the customers directly, and it was not getting much income. Accordingly, this was an issue of External bottlenecks, which means that while the staff had the capacity to serve more people, there was not enough demand coming their way. After a while, Tim Hortons started accepting orders from Uber eats and Doordash delivery, as a result of which, the restaurant is getting the higher profits which also helps maintain the market position and address the issue of external bottlenecks (NOTE: if you have some ballpark numbers to add here, it will be great to give the audience a sense of how much improvement was obtained in throughput as a result). However, a downside of these increased delivery channels was an increased wait time for the customers and an increased burden on employees as they needed to do more hard work (and obviously this caused an internal bottleneck to form). Tim Hortons could address this issue through the following actions (which is an example of spiral improvements and shifting the bottlenecks as per what is described on page 113):
- Increase the number of resources
- Look for ways to speed up the processes
- Provide incentives to encourage happy hours and outside the peak hours ordering to level the capacity and move work off the bottlenecks"