MGMT400 Assignment 1 (Pre-Class Assignment) – Read Chapters 1 & 2     Required Materials      Operations Methods in Value Chain Management  Managing Operations Across the Supply Chain by Morgan Swink, Steven A. Melnyk, M. Bixby Cooper, Janet L. Hartley, 2nd Edition, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. ISBN 978-0-07-802403-0 From your syllabus: “The assignment is due at the start of the class. Late submissions are penalized 50% of the possible points. Submissions more than a week late will not be accepted. I expect you to show all of your work. You will lose points for only providing solutions. Assignments are not take-home exams. Instead, they are intended to provide you with opportunities to review and practice the course materials. Therefore, they will not be graded on the correctness/accuracy of the answers, but they will be graded based on the level of effort given. This means that even a hint of plagiarism (e.g. copying from someone else’s work or external source) will result in a score of zero on the assignment.”  Consider the following processes that you frequently encounter as a college student: (a) Enrolling in classes. (b) Taking a class. Describe each process and its inputs, activities, and outputs. What is being converted or transformed in each process? Who are the customers, suppliers, and stakeholders for each process?   Select two products that you have recently purchased; one should be a service and the other a manufactured good. What product characteristics were most important to you? What are the primary operations management decisions made by the companies that determine these characteristics?   You are an operations manager of a pharmaceutical firm. Identify 2 stakeholders who are not your customers or suppliers, and explain why it is important to consider each stakeholder’s interests.   Why should the firm never outsource its core capabilities? What happens if the firm is approached by a supplier who is willing to supply goods and services based on these core capabilities at a significantly lower price? What should the firm do?   Find an example of a company that makes quality its competitive priority. Find another company that makes flexibility its competitive priority. What are some of the order winners, order qualifiers, and order losers for these two companies? How do they use the concepts of order winners, order qualifiers, and order losers to decide their competitive priorities?    6. Fit is critical to the development and maintenance of a successful operations strategy. Suppose that we are faced with a firm in which there is a lack of fit between the outcomes desired by the critical customer, the value proposition, and the firm’s capabilities. What options are available to the firm in the short term when dealing with this lack of fit? What is the impact of the lack of fit? What are the implications of the firm trying to improve the fit?