BUS 528 Week 6 Assignment A-2

Assignment A-2
Chapter 6 ideas- Work Breakdown Structure

The first time that I ever exposed to the word WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) was back during my college days in the early twenty hundreds.

We were taught about WBS in Engineering Management course and we use it in one of our project – 'Development of Multi-functional System in Poultry Farm – iFarm'.

This WBS helps us to breakdown each of the division or segment that we need to deliver and expect in a structure manner. We can also plan the approach/ timeline/ responsibility accordingly.

So, a brief summary of what is iFarm:

• an automated and multi-functional system that will cover the operation and maintenance of a poultry farm which will be controlled by a microcontroller.
• This project is aim to reduce workforce, increase productivity, low budget with advance technology equipment.

Above is the brochure of the iFarm project.

Right now, referring back to the project that I did with the team, I feel regret as we didn’t patent the name iFarm (almost similar to iPhone, iPad, iPod nowadays)…no point complaining...we missed the flight...hahahaha

Anyway, below is just to share part of my early days course work during my college days without much working experience. Special thanks to my old project team mates – Michael and Desmond.

Work Breakdown Structure for the Development of Multi-functional System in Poultry Farm - iFarm

A. Do Project Research

A.1 Identify Needs for Project

A.1.1 Project Objectives

A.1.2 Project Plan

A.2 Outcome Expectations

B. Develop Planning Proposal

B.1 Proposed Scheme Layout

B.1.1 feasibility assessment

B.1.2 mapping

B.2 Phases of Development

B.2.1 Schedule

C. Detailed Design Works

C.1 Software Design

C.1.1 Software architecture overview

C.1.2 Software integration

C.2 Hardware and Circuitry Design

C.2.1 Power supply

C.2.2 Main board

C.3 Interface Design

D. Implementations of Project

D.1 Installation

D.2 Testing and Debugging

D.2.1 UAT process

BUS 528 Week 6 Assignment A-1

Assignment A-1
Chapter 5 ideas- Risk Management

Earlier of the semester, we were ask to comment why Project Management is important and what is our expectation for this course of study.

This assignment on Chapter 5 – Risk Management further meet my expectation that touched on Murphy’s law topic that I mentioned in my first week Assignment blog for this subject BUS 528.
http://lowedmond.blogspot.com/2010/06/bus-528-week-1-assignment.html

Let’s find out who is Murphy and why he have his own law from this link:
http://www.murphys-laws.com/murphy/murphy-true.html

Basically – the main point is “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”.

These are few of the exposure, tool or knowledge I learn through out the years that very much relates to Risk Management from identifying/ forecasting the issues --> Develop mitigation plan --> Establish contingency --> Close loop risk management

• FMEA – Failure Mode and Effect analysis
• Reliability Analysis
• Fishbone diagrams
• Bowtie diagrams
• 6 sigma

The advantages of managing risk will lead to;

• Good company image and competitiveness
• Improve quality, reliability and safety of a product/process
• Customer satisfaction
• Reduce system development time and cost
• Reduce future failures, capture engineering knowledge
• Preventing problem
• Prosper teamwork and idea exchange between functional team

BUS 550 - Discussion topic: week 5

Determine which variables pose the greatest risk in winery.

After doing some reading about winery industry, the raw material of ‘Grape’ is one of the variable cost that poses the greatest and most risk.
Obtaining the wine grapes is varied by the quality, contractual agreements, unpredictable supply market and the juice yield.
The grape prices can be lower with bulk buying (not to forget to buy the quality and the grape with most juice yield). This translates to lower variable costs that also bring advantage to the company to generate more cash flow by playing around with the price per bottle sell.
The positive cash flow (sustainable growth) brings significant advantage to the company rather than trying to increase the capacity to 100% in short time of period but end up losing money as the company encounter over stock/ supplies with short demand and need to sell the stock in low prices.
Also, maximizing the capacity for 10years of operation is not healthy, a business need to plan for future growth to accommodate 30,000 gallons, 50,000 gallons or more to stay profitable and expansion.
Below is my proposal of the ideal price per bottle - $9.99 (business strategy to catch consumer’s mind) with a little conservative percentage of 50% of variable cost (considering the higher risk of the raw material threats – grapes/ labor cost/ tax and others miscellaneous expenses).
The following proposal expect positive NPV = +$613k and IRR of 22% ( the higher the IRR , the better the returns relative to cost, and the lower the risk).
Besides, the company need to start planning for expansion by year 6 as the capacity will be fully utilized.

http://www.agribusiness-mgmt.wsu.edu/agbusresearch/docs/wine_grapes/xb0997e.pdf

http://www.extension.agecon.vt.edu/pdf/VWBG%20(May%2014,%202009).pdf