Exam Case Study Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Exam Case Study - Assignment Example Later to follow are the recommendations to overcome the stated problems and improve company’s performance. Problems faced Primary problems faced by Sunshine Shirts come under the category of delivery delays and bottlenecks in quality. Delays are attributed to factors like large number of inspections, inventory and warehousing issues and lengthy production cycle of shirts. Also, type and volume of orders in the three categories also contribute to delays in deliveries. For quality concerns, even large number of inspections is not proving beneficial since printing is not getting appreciated by the customers. Faulty shirts are also getting in the orders which are resulting in increased number of complaints and reduced customer loyalty. Delays in deliveries and quality pitfalls cumulate to rising costs but no increased profit margins. Thus, an indirect offshoot of the above mentioned problems is an urgent need for cost-cutting campaign which can not be realized unless careful and m eticulous strategic planning is undertaken. Following next are specific instances which have led to the above mentioned problems of faulty planning, delays and quality concerns. Sources of problems Superficially, problems seem to be very generic, trivial and operations based. However, upon careful observation and deep analysis, the sources of these problems vary from strategic planning to inventory management, quality management and even setting up of performance measures. Detailed breakdown of sources of problems is given below: Strategic planning Strategic planning is a wide concept covering numerous operations within a specific business. From human resources to operations, production to management and even after sales, strategic planning entails setting up of standards, crafting plans according to those standards and measuring actual outputs to find out deviations. At Sunshine Shirts, planning has not taken a serious form. Various loopholes exist in different functions and domain s. Opening sentences where it is mentioned that the company budgeted for but still reported losses is a clear example of poor planning. Next for example, the problem of delivery delays can primarily be attributed to planning glitch. Before actual inventory management, it is the work of planning to ascertain the flow of raw materials, work-in-progress and finished goods. Faulty planning has led to faulty warehousing and chaos at factory space. Secondly, customer complaints have increased at Sunshine Shirts due to printing issues as ink on shirts peels off. This might be due to wrong supplier selection of printing inks which is again a function of strategic planning in a company. Further, regarding costs, company officials and heads of various departments are suggesting different solutions- reducing number of inspections, outsourcing, and charging premium price for better quality and even enter women shirts market. However, consensus cannot be achieved in finalizing a solution. This i s because the company does not know whether its competitive advantage lies in low cost or better quality. As such, direction of its strategic planning is not focused on one of these dimensions, leading to disadvantages and losses in both. To cut costs, managers are recommending outsourcing some of the activities to nations where production costs are lower. However, they do not see that expenses incurred on its three types of customer segments outweigh the returns yielded by these. Thus, even customer profitability analysis is not

Female Prisoners Sexually Abused and Sold by Correctional Officers OR Article

Female Prisoners Sexually Abused and Sold by Correctional Officers OR Female Prisoner Impregnated by Correctional Officers - Article Example This implies that men do not have direct contact with female inmates. In the United States, male guards were not allowed to come into direct contact with female prisoners until 1964 Civil Rights Act (Figueira-McDonough & Sarri, 2002). About forty percent of women prison guards were men, and they had direct contact with the prisoners by the year 2007. The United States had 93,031 prisoners by the end of 2001. Women are incarcerated because of the increased war on drugs. The rapid increase of the population of women prisoners was not anticipated by the male dominated prison industry. Although United States prisons are for correcting offenders, most of the female prisons lack the facilities of accommodating healthcare, mental, and social needs of the prisoners (Parker, 2002). The number of women prisoners has been on the rise over the recent years in the United States but most of them do not face violent charges as opposed to men. Women prisoners have different experiences to those of men because women menstruate, and are very much affected by losing their children to Child Protective Services (Parker, 2002). Majority of women convicts are sexually or physically abused before they are convicted or are drug addicts. Men make up the majority of prisoners in the United States but the rate of the increase of number of women prisoners is worrying because it is more than that of men. Incarcerated women tend to form structures similar to those of families in a bid to ensure that they live, as they would have in the society. On the contrary, men become aggressive and isolate themselves from the other inmates (Rudolf, 2012). Increase in the number of female prisoners has resulted in the need of increased number of prison staff. Men are not emotionally or physically affected by incarceration as women are. This is because women are faced with the daunting task of facing sexual abuse in prisons. This can be attributed to the fact that the number of men staffing