LOGISTICS, OPERATIONS, AND CHANGE MANAGEMENT

*ONLY USE UPLOADED SOURCES* INTRODUCTION Today’s business environment requires competency in logistics, operations, and change management. In this assessment, you will take on the role of an operations manager who has to manage product distribution to consumers when faced with challenges. You will choose a change management model to help you address a bottleneck or barrier in your distribution process. As you complete the assessment, use your experience as a seller or consumer to identify best practices for getting products to customers. ASSUMPTIONS You are the operations manager for a musical instrument manufacturing business in Mount Vernon, Washington. The company has been designing and hand finishing solid wood mandolins for over 30 years. Mandolins are fragile, stringed instruments that vary in size based on the retailer’s request, but the most popular size is just over 27 inches (0.6858 meters) in length and 10 inches (0.254 meters) in width. The average cost for a mandolin at the company is $2500. The company has earned a strong reputation because it only uses high-quality, solid wood materials, and it prides itself on designing and hand finishing over 250 mandolins per week. When a mandolin is ready to be shipped to the retailer, great care needs to be taken to ensure that the product is not damaged or broken. The manufacturer delivers to retailers in the United States and Europe and generally receives orders between April and October. In mid-October, when you still have 1,000 orders to fill to meet retailer demands for the holiday season, your company begins receiving low-quality, raw materials from a preferred supplier that you have used for 20 years. The wood breaks when the mandolin is being manufactured, which results in a high number of defects, reduced manufacturing capacity, increased wait time between manufacture and hand finishing, and missed delivery date commitments. Retailers are very upset that they are not receiving full orders, and your company still has no commitment from the supplier on the next high-quality shipment of solid wood materials. Retailers have expressed their concerns about the company’s ability to recover from this issue in time to deliver mandolins before the holiday season begins. REQUIREMENTS Your submission must be your original work. No more than a combined total of 30% of the submission and no more than a 10% match to any one individual source can be directly quoted or closely paraphrased from sources, even if cited correctly. The originality report that is provided when you submit your task can be used as a guide. You must use the rubric to direct the creation of your submission because it provides detailed criteria that will be used to evaluate your work. Each requirement below may be evaluated by more than one rubric aspect. The rubric aspect titles may contain hyperlinks to relevant portions of the course. A. Discuss options and considerations for transporting your product to the retail facilities by doing the following: 1. Discuss two options for packaging your product and why you chose them 2. Discuss two possible risks to consider when storing your product and how you will mitigate those risks. 3. Describe two options for transporting your product from the manufacturer to retail facilities in both the US and Europe. a. Discuss an advantage and a disadvantage for each of your chosen modes of transportation. b. Discuss a cost and time consideration for each of your chosen modes of transportation. 4. Discuss two benefits of using a transportation management system for your product. B. Discuss how you would address a barrier or bottleneck in transporting your product to the retail facilities by doing the following: 1. Describe how a barrier or bottleneck from the scenario can affect transporting your product. 2. Choose either the Lewin or ADKAR change management model and discuss how you would apply each step of your chosen model to address the bottleneck or barrier. 3. Discuss how you will address an ethical consideration for the barrier or bottleneck. C. Acknowledge sources, using in-text citations and references, for content that is quoted, paraphrased, or summarized. D. Demonstrate professional communication in the content and presentation of your submission.