The (A) case involves managing the planning and execution of the first convocation held at one of the campuses of a business school in Nagpur, India, at fairly short notice. The school’s chairperson of post-graduate studies in management programs has been appointed as the chief co-ordinator of the event. Leveraging his operations-management background and working in collaboration with other faculty, he sets about identifying the required activities and their precedence relationships in order to ascertain the time required to complete these activities.<br><br>The (B) case 9B13D004 presents a situation that arises about three weeks into the project that necessitates some replanning in midstream.
The case describes the situation faced by the vice-president of operations at Konkan Leaf Tobacco Development, the tobacco processing unit of XYZ Limited. This unit is in charge of procurement and processing of different varieties and grades of tobacco grown in southern India. The tobacco leaves are categorized into different varieties on the basis of quality and location of the crop. The company has two processing plants with varying processing capacities. Due to the seasonal and agricultural nature of the commodity, the company is finding it difficult to maintain efficiencies between the inflow of the tobacco and the requirement of the processing line capacity, resulting in frequent start-stop situations for the processing lines. This case enables students to develop strategies for the process management to achieve the optimum process schedule, which will result in the fewest stoppages of the process lines and optimization of both the utilization of the processing lines and the inflow patterns among the processing units.