Academic Integrity Policy Statement
Toronto Business College, a Loyalist College in Toronto partner, upholds a learning community that values academic integrity, honesty, fairness, trust, respect, responsibility and courage. These values enhance TBC’s commitment to students by delivering high-quality education and teaching excellence, while supporting a positive learning environment.
Should there be suspected breach of Academic Integrity (e.g. contract cheating, falsification, impersonation or plagiarism), the academic integrity sanctions will be applied according to the severity of the offence committed
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KUPI BUSINESS
Founded in 2005, KUPI is a start - up company in the high - tech manufacturing industry that provides a variety of build - to - order products. Because of the industry nature, new products are constantly being updated, and the slow movers usually get left behind. While other companies in the same market are struggling with the economic downturns, KUPI Business surprisingly grows fast. This is thanks to the management team, whose vision it is to encourage and cultivate new ideas for business and process improvements. One important factor contributing to the company’s rapid growth is the organizational strategy, which directs the company to seize market opportunities whenever possible. Fast delivery is one of the company promises. This strategy works fairly well. In fact, a little too well because the company has grown unexpectedly too fast.
Recently, demands for KUPI products have risen over 150 percent. Although this is a good news, the company’s capabilities can’t keep up with the rising demands, especially at peak periods. In attempting to deal with the growing demands, the company has created several more requisitions for customer service to take care of all new orders and customer relations. However, challenges in integrating various works among different functions are still overwhelming. That is because KUPI’s build - to - order products require intensive assembling processes, which involve a number of people from electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, test engineering, and manufacturing, just to name a few. Each function possesses different specialties needed to carry the products to the final assemblies. At the moment, the work for each customer account is pretty much in sequence, following one silo to the next until the product is ready (see Figure 13.1)
The need for interaction among departments is minimal because of the way the products are originally designed. However, as the demands increase, so do the product complexities. This requires more and more interaction across the organization, which is difficult for KUPI ’ s current structure. Plus, the existing operations worked fine only when there were not too many customer accounts.
Now things are starting to fall apart. Just a week ago, multiple deliveries slipped, and the problem seems to be continuing. John Rossman is the director of engineering at KUPI. He is concerned that the problem will soon become a company - wide crisis. He knows things will go south if there is no change in the company. But he is not exactly sure what changes are needed. Changes in organizational structure to facilitate the communication and decision making? Changes in operations process to speed up the manufacturing? Or something else? The list keeps getting longer, and every solution seems workable. One fine Sunday, John goes out for a walk and finds ads about program management training on a billboard. “ Program management for improved business results: the coordinated management of interdependent endeavors to achieve a set of business goals. ” After reading the description of the course and short explanation about program management, he thinks program management may be what he’s been looking for. With joyful excitement, John can ’t wait until Monday to discuss this idea with his peers.
Questions:
1. Do you think program management is an appropriate approach?
2. What would be your recommendation? How would you approach the problem?