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.

Scenario
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 $2,500. The company has earned a strong reputation because it uses only 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 for the holiday season.

During this time, an insurance adjuster wants to inquire about the insurability of your company’s overall operations. The insurance adjuster sends a request for information to you as listed in the requirements for this task.
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 similarity 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.

Tasks may not be submitted as cloud links, such as links to Google Docs, Google Slides, OneDrive, etc., unless specified in the task requirements. All other submissions must be file types that are uploaded and submitted as attachments (e.g., .docx, .pdf, .ppt).

A.  Discuss options and considerations for transporting the product described in the scenario to the retail facilities by doing the following:

1.  Identify two different product packaging options and explain why you chose them.

2.  Identify two different potential risks to consider when storing your product and describe how you will mitigate each risk.

3.  Describe two transportation modes to move your product from the manufacturer to the retail facilities. Then explain an advantage and a disadvantage of each chosen transportation mode.

4.  Describe two different characteristics of the transportation management system (TMS) that will aid in transporting the 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 the product.

2.  Choose either the Lewin or ADKAR change management model and discuss how you would apply each step of the chosen model to address the barrier or bottleneck from part B1.

3.  Discuss how you will address an ethical consideration for the barrier or bottleneck from part B1.

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.

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