An Emergency Request You are a general plant supervisor and seven product lines
ID: 434444 • Letter: A
Question
An Emergency Request
You are a general plant supervisor and seven product lines involving four of your eight foremen must be disrupted to satisfy an emergency request from an important client. You naturally wish to minimize the disruption. No additional personnel are available, and time limits to complete the new project are restrictive. The plant is new and is the only industrial plant in an economically depressed area dominated by farming. You can count on everyone pulling his or her own weight. The wages in the plant are substantially above farm wages, and the workers’ jobs depend on the profitability of this plant—the first new industrial development in the area in 15 years. Your subordinates are relatively inexperienced, and you have been supervising them more closely than you might if the plant had been in a well-established industrial area and your subordinates were more experienced. The changes involve only standard procedures and are routine for someone of your experience. Effective supervision poses no problems. Your problem is how to reschedule the work to meet this emergency within the time limit with minimum disruption of the existing product lines. Your experience in such matters should enable you to figure out a way of meeting the request that will minimize the disruption of existing product lines.
Here is the Question:
In about one page, identify the underlying problem and what you, as the Office Manager, would do to resolve this situation. Be sure to make specific recommendations, as though you were consulting with the Office Manager.
Explanation / Answer
As the manpower is limited, we need to effectively plan the situation with the available resources. The supervisor must evaluate the criticality of the 7 product lines. He must also conduct a SWOT analysis of each of his foremen to have a clear understanding about their strengths and weaknesses. Based on the criticality of the product lines, he can plan disrupt of the least critical lines. Also, based on the SWOT analysis of the foremen, he can identify the foremen who can multitask and are experienced enough to handle a product line all by himself. The WBS of the emergency request project must be done to estimate the actual requirement of manpower in that project. Based on all the estimations, foremen may be allotted projects based on criticality and efficiency of each foreman. Also the tasks in each product line can be divided into core and support tasks. External recruitment can be done to select some employees for the support tasks, which do not need a technical standpoint. This way, the critical and core tasks can be handled by the experienced foremen while the support tasks can be assigned to new hires. This will also ensure minimum disruption of product lines.