Neil is a decision maker for Pepe’s Atlantic Sausage Company. Because there are several suppliers of ingredients and their prices fluctuate, he has come up with several different formulations for the various sausages that he makes, depending on the availability of particular ingredients from particular suppliers. He then orders ingredients accordingly twice a week. Even though he cannot predict when ingredients will become available at a particular price, his ordering of supplies can be considered routine.

Question

a. On what level of management is Neil working? Explain in a paragraph.

b. What attributes of his job would have to change before you would categorize him as working on a different level of management? List them.

Uncover any conflicting data collected through other data gathering methods.

Answer 1

A. Neil is working at the operations management level. He makes decisions using predetermined rules that have predictable outcomes. His responsibility is to manage inventories, a basic task of the organization, which must be accomplished on time and in accordance with organizational constraints.

B. The following is a list of attributes of Neil’s job which would have to change before he can be categorized as working on a different level of management:

a. Decision horizon of long range
b. Decision objectives increase
c. Problem identification becomes more difficult
d. Nature of problems become mainly semi-structured
e. Set of alternatives which are difficult to articulate
f. One-time decision nature
g. Mainly heuristic decision style