Production and Operations Management

PRM39 - Assignment 1

Guidelines: Submission

1. Due date - 10-1-2019, Time- 23:59:59 Hrs.

2. A day (or >1) ahead has incentive of 5% extra marks of total obtained marks. And, a
delayed submission has penalty of 10% (any delay 1-10 hours). No acceptance after delay
of 10 hours.
3. Submission should be in Soft copy to jebsy@irma.ac.in
4. Submit the report in word file. Supporting files are welcome.

Q1. A company XYZ is trying to decide a forecasting technique to forecast the future
demand for their product.

Period Demand
1 88
2 95
3 90
4 94
5 89
6 92
7 100
8 98

a) Prepare forecast for the same period using exponential smoothing with alpha = 0.2
and 0.6.
b) Calculate MAD for each set of forecasts. Given your results, which forecast appears
to be more accurate? Explain.
c) Calculate the MSE for each set of forecasts. Given your results which forecast
appears to be more accurate?
d) In practice, either MAD or MSE would be employed to calculate forecast errors.
What factors might lead a manager to choose one rather than the other?
e) Calculate MAPE for each data set. Which forecast appears to be more accurate?

Q2. In a shopping mall a new IRCTC travel ticket desk is opened with 1 ticket agent. It
is estimated that requests for ticket and information will average 15 per hour, and
requests will have a Poisson distribution. Service time is assumed to be exponentially
distributed. Previous experience with similar operations suggests that mean service
time should average about 3 minutes per request. Determine each of the following
 a) Prepare a service blueprint for new IRCTC travel ticket desk
b) System Utilization
c) Percentage of time the server will be idle.
d) The expected no. of customers waiting to be served.
e) The average time customers will spend in the system.
f) The probability of zero customers in the system and the probability of four
customers in the system.

Q3. Perform a detailed quality function deployment analysis, developing as product,

delivery services for customers in the rural area, such as an e-commerce firm
Flipkart, Amazon, Ebay, Jabong and Myntra. Opt any one e-commerce firm as
manager and keep others as competitor.