Mary Rhodes, operations manager at Northeast Furniture, received the following demand forecast:
Jan: 1,000; Feb. 1,200; March 1,400; April 1,800; May 1,800; June 1,600
Assume stockout costs for lost sales of $100 per unit, inventory carrying costs of $25 per unit per month and zero beginning and ending inventory. Evaluate the following two plans on an incremental cost basis:
Alternative 1: Produce at a steady rate, equal to minimum requirements, of 1,000 units per month. Subcontract enough additional units, at $60 per unit premium cost, to avoid lost sales.
What is the cost of alternative 1?
What is the total holding (inventory) cost?
Alternative 2: Vary the workforce to match monthly demand. The current workforce most recently produced 1,300 units last month. The cost of hiring workers is $3,00 per 100 units of capacity increase, while firing is $6,000 per 100 units of capacity decrease.
What is the total cost of alternative 2?
How many units are produced via regular time production?
Which alternative has lower incremental cost?

You are a manager at asda. you have been given the demand data for the past 10 weeks for swim rings for children. you decide to run multiple types of forecasting methods on the data to see which gives you the best forecast. if you were to use exponential smoothing with alpha =.8, what would be your forecast for week 22? (the forecast for week 21 was 1277.) week demand 12 1317 13 1307 14 1261 15 1258 16 1267 17 1256 18 1268 19 1277 20 1277 21 1297

Your subscription to investing wisely weekly is about to expire. you plan to subscribe to the magazine for the rest of your life, and you can renew it by paying $85 annually, beginning immediately, or you can get a lifetime subscription for $620, also payable immediately. assuming that you can earn 6.0% on your funds and that the annual renewal rate will remain constant, how many years must you live to make the lifetime subscription the better buy?

Blue computers, a major pc manufacturer in the united states, currently has plants in kentucky and pennsylvania. the kentucky plant has a capacity of 1 million units a year and the pennsylvania plant has a capacity of 1.5 million units a year. the firm divides the united states into five markets: northeast, southeast, midwest, south, and west. each pc sells for $1,000. the firm anticipates a 50 perc~nt growth in demand (in each region) this year (after which demand will stabilize) and wants to build a plant with a capacity of 1.5 million units per year to accommodate the growth. potential sites being considered are in north carolina and california. currently the firm pays federal, state, and local taxes on the income from each plant. federal taxes are 20 percent of income, and all state and local taxes are 7 percent of income in each state. north carolina has offered to reduce taxes for the next 10 years from 7 percent to 2 percent. blue computers would like to take the tax break into consideration when planning its network. consider income over the next 10 years in your analysis. assume that all costs remain unchanged over the 10 years. use a discount factor of 0.1 for your analysis. annual fixed costs, production and shipping costs per unit, and current regional demand (before the 50 percent growth) are shown in table 5-13. (a) if blue computers sets an objective of minimizing total fixed and variable costs, where should they build the new plant? how should the network be structured? (b) if blue computers sets an objective of maximizing after-tax profits, where should they build the new plant? how should the network be structured? variable production and shipping cost ($/unit) annual fixed cost northeast southeast midwest south west (million$) kentucky 185 180 175 175 200 150 pennsylvania 170 190 180 200 220 200 n. carolina 180 180 185 185 215 150 california 220 220 195 195 175 150 demand ('000 units/month) 700 400 400 300 600