College American Supportive Comments Essay

 

 

Risk is defined in financial terms as the chance that an outcome or investment’s actual gains will differ from an expected outcome or return.(Chen, 2022) Risk includes the possibility of losing some or all of an original investment. Uncertainty is defined as the situation where future outlook for the economy is unpredictable. In our business, we have to assess both risk and uncertainty. We take risks on new employees, new material, meeting new clients, and dealing with both morning hour and night schedules. You never really know what you’ll expect and when to expect it so we just have to be ready to take action when things do not turn out the way we expected initially. This leads into uncertainty when hiring new employees, making new contracts with new managers of different companies because when you first me someone you do not know thier working habits, how they react to certain situations, if and how they problem solve difficult situations, etc. I think we handle these two concepts differently because they can lead to different outcomes some good and some bad but that’s part of the business. At times we can predict what will come and other times it may seem like we can foreshadow what will happen until we get hit with a total different outcome.

Respond here:

So, I work for a Fortune 500 company and when it comes to making deals or going above and beyond with a customer is apparent when compared to working with smaller companies. One time I was working on a deal with Walmart in Southern Oregon about gaining additional distribution points near the register. The project itself cost $30K a store, took about 45 days to regain the ROI in revenue, and 90 days to regain ROI from the marginal contribution. The last store I was finalizing the terms of the agreement was instant on our competition to be represented as well. I didn’t like it, but the store and I agreed to give them 30% of the space which was a fair representation of their share in sales at the store. I went to that company and said that can have the space if they provide $10K for the installation. Unfortunately for them, they could not get approval from finance because of the upfront cost and couldn’t risk if the distribution points go away because they are not contracts, so Walmart’s home office could decide to get rid of them. So, we could take the risk, and because we were able to pay we secured all the space without competition.

Respond here:

While my department is not facing blending problems, it is facing scheduling and logistical challenges. In our department, the main challenge is worker shortage and turnover. This shortage leads to underproduction and overwhelms the current workers, resulting in financial and organizational costs that could be avoided through linear optimization models, which minimize these costs and ensure the production requirement is fulfilled (Anderson et al., 2015). Our logistical challenges are based on the physical space in which we work. During COVID, we all worked from home, and production actually increased. Our team expanded and produced better quality work in less time. Our organization brought us back into the office one day a week several months ago. Production on this day has dipped. The organization is now considering bringing teams back on campus for the majority, if not the entire, week. This decision would certainly be helped using linear optimization models as I am quite sure remote work would appear as the best option for optimizing my team’s productivity. We would also be able to show why we should open the currently unfilled positions up to remote workers, addressing the shortage issue, too.

Respond here:

In my current organization, the use of production scheduling in relation to linear programming is already in use to handle the complexity of manufacturing multiple products and knowing the appropriate amount of time to allocate to each product to maximize in profit, and avoid the misuse of resources, and labor. The problem becomes complex when programs believe their product should take priority in manufacturing in comparison to others. The answer to a production scheduling problem assists the organization to create an efficient, low-cost production plan for one or more products over a period of time. Because linear programming for production scheduling issues is recurrent, managers may simply supply the data—demand, capacities, and so on—for the production period and utilize the linear programming model to build the production plan periodically after the model has been developed, thus always aiming to improve the business process (Anderson et al., 2016).

Respond here: