Hiring highly-skilled employees with great potential eliminates the need to provide orientation and training.

What is product differentiation, and how can it be achieved ? what is product positioning? what conditions would head to head product positioning be appropriate?

Management discovers that a supervisor at one of its restaurant locations removes excess cash and resets sales totals throughout the day on the point-of-sale (pos) system. at closing, the supervisor deposits cash equal to the recorded sales on the pos system and keeps the rest. the supervisor forwards the close-of-day pos reports from the pos system along with a copy of the bank deposit slip to the company’s revenue accounting department. the revenue accounting department records the sales and the cash for the location in the general ledger and verifies the deposit slip to the bank statement. any differences between sales and deposits are recorded in an over/short account and, if necessary, followed up with the location supervisor. the customer food order checks are serially numbered, and it is the supervisor’s responsibility to see that they are accounted for at the end of each day. customerchecks and the transaction journal tapes from the pos system are kept by the supervisor for 1 week at the location and then destroyed. what control allowed the fraud to occur?

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