Creature Care Animal Clinic

Chapter 1: Creature Care Animal Clinic (A)

1. Dr. Barr is having problems with information systems because has inventory problems and scheduling problems. Also they have medications that are past expired which shouldn’t happen that often.
2. The schedule probably doesn’t work here because there is no formal system of inventory management. Also she hasn’t adopted clinic hours to match times when patients bring in their animals. To me their seems to be a lack of communication between staff because people are placing multiple orders of medication. Also I feel like her staff doesn’t know exactly what they are supposed to do so people are duplicating work or forgetting to do things and letting other people know.
3. The clinic is having inventory problems because there is not central system or log that they can look at to see what is in stock, and everyone has purchasing power so no one communicates with each other to see what was ordered.
4. Dr. Barr should have created an inventory system from the beginning, she should set up a better scheduling system to match demand. She should clear identify what each staff member should be doing so everything gets done.
5. I would tell Dr. Barr to get rid of late hours on Wednesday and change it to Thursday or Saturday when more people are likely to bring in their animals. I would suggest that she make task for staff on what their duties are daily. Also find some type of inventory system that can be used to manage inventory.

Chapter 2: Prime Bank of Massachusetts

1. Operations function is important in implementing the strategy of an organization because it brings together all the resources to produce the end product the company is looking for in this case better customer service and reliability along with efficiency. The changes by Victoria Chen and her team will help the bank because she is going to identify the problems on the operations management side which then can be fixed once the problems are known.

• ATM’s
• Staff
• Drive-through windows
• Tellers
• Customer Service representatives
• Locations of banks and ATM’s
• Online Banking
• Mobile App

Both banks and ATM’s should be placed in convenient locations that people would be likely to visit in their normal routine, so they don’t have to go out of their way to find a bank. Also the staff could be increased during peak hours with part-time employees. More locations should be converted into locations with drive-through, and maybe have automated drive-through. We could make an online banking and mobile app so less people would have to come to the bank physically all the time. With these and hiring some people to manage the 24/7 customer service lines and or automate the call with a short menu to better direct the call. These should be enough to support Prime Bank new customer service strategy.